Organon §81

How psora came to manifest itself in such a wide variety of forms.

It is, to some extent, understandable how psora could now unfold itself in so many countless disease forms in all the human race since this age-old infectious tinder has gone, little by little, through many millions of human organisms over the course of hundreds of generations, thus attaining an incredible proliferation. This is all the more understandable when we consider the multitude of circumstances 138 that have tended to contribute to the formation of this great diversity of chronic diseases (secondary symptoms of psora), as well as the indescribable variety of human congenital bodily constitutions, which already, in and of themselves, deviate so greatly from one another.

It is also no wonder that so many different malignities, impinging from within and without (often lastingly) upon such a variety of organisms permeated with the psoric miasm, would produce untold different deficiencies, deteriorations, mistunements and sufferings. These have been falsely listed in the pathology books, under a multitude of names, as diseases existing in and of themselves. 139

Comment

138 Some of these causes that modified the formation of psora into chronic maladies include:1. climate and the particular natural quality of the location in which one lives,2. very irregular upbringing of youth- the neglected, distorted or over-refined development of body or spirit,3. misuse of body or spirit in one's vocation or in life relationships,4. dietary regimen,5. human passions,6. customs, practices and habits of many kinds, etc.

139 These books contain so many improper, ambiguous names, under each of which are included highly different disease states that often only resemble one another in a single symptom, for example: ague, jaundice, dropsy, consumption, leukorrhea, hemorrhoids, rheumatism, stroke, convulsions, hysteria, hypochondria, melancholia, mania, quinsy, palsy, etc. These are declared to be unvarying, fixed diseases in and of themselves and are dealt with according to the name, following ordinary established practice! How could the bestowal of such a name justify uniform medicinal management? And if the treatment is not always to be the same, then why use the identical name, which is misleading and presupposes the same treatment?"Nihil sane in artem medicam pestiferum magis unquam irrepsit malum, quam generalia quaedam nomina morbis imponere iisque aptare velle gen-eralem quandam medicinam" [Indeed, no more deadly evil has ever stolen into the art of medicine than the imposition of certain general names on diseases as well as the wish to adapt a certain general medicine to them], says Huxham (Op. phys. med., tome I), whose insight and sensitive conscience command respect. Likewise, Fritze (Annalen [Annals], vol I, p. 80) complains that essentially different diseases are called by one name. Even those common acute diseases that are indeed able to propagate themselves within each single epidemic (by an infectious matter of their own which remains unknown to us) are documented by the old school of medicine as if they were already known, fixed diseases that always recur in the same form. [These are designated with names] such as typhus fever, hospital fever, dungeon fever, camp fever, putrid fever, typhoid nerve fever, mucous fever etc., even though every epidemic of such circulating fevers distinguishes itself each time as a different new disease, never before entirely extant, and diverging greatly as to its course, several of its most striking symptoms, and its entire conduct. Each epidemic differs so greatly from all preceding ones that one would have to disavow all logical conceptual precision to give them the same name and treat them the same, in accordance with this faulty label. Only the sincere Sydenham (Opera., chap. 2, "De Morb. Epid.," p. 43) saw this, for he insists that no epidemic disease should be taken for any previous one and treated in the same way, since they are all indeed different from one another, howsoever many of them gradually appear:  Animum admiratione percellit, quam discolor et sui plane dissimilis morborum epidemicorum facies; quae tam aperta horum morborum diversitas tum propriis ac sibi perculiaribus symptomatis tum etiam medendi ratione, quam hi ab illis disparem sibi vindicant, satis illucescit. Ex quibus constat, morbos epidemicos, utut externa quatantenus specie et symptomatis aliquot utrisque pariter convenire paullo incautioribus videantur, re tamen ipsa, si bene adverteris animum, alienae esse admodum indolis et distare ut aera lupinis. [It strikes the mind with wonder how varied and clearly dissimilar are the presentations of epidemic diseases. The obvious diversity of these diseases is made sufficiently clear, both by their own characteristic and peculiar symptoms and by the methods of curing them, which in their difference from one another demonstrate the disparity. From which it follows that, however much some epidemic diseases may seem to the slightly incautious to agree in their outward forms and symptoms, in reality-if you pay careful attention- they are quite different in nature and stand apart from each other as real money does from play money.]From all this it becomes clear that these useless and wrongful disease names may not have any influence on the treatment mode of a genuine medical-art practitioner who is aware that he is to judge and to cure not according to the nominal similarity of a single symptom, but according to the entire complex of all the signs of the individual state of each single patient whose sufferings he has the duty to exactly spy out, never permitting himself to merely hypothetically presuppose them. However, if one still believes that occasionally it is necessary to use certain disease names in order to be succinctly understood by ordinary people, then one should use these disease names only collectively and say, for example, that the patient has a kind of St. Vitus' dance, a kind of dropsy, a kind of nerve fever, a kind of ague; never however (so that the delusion in these names may finally cease once and for all) that he has the St. Vitus' dance, the nerve fever, the dropsy, the ague, since there certainly are not any fixed, unvarying diseases by these or any similar names.