What is a Psora?

The great extent of this disease is shown in the new symptoms appearing from time to time.

The Homoeopathic physician must not hope to permanently heal the separate manifestations of this kind in the presumption, hitherto entertained, that they are well-defined, separately existing diseases which can be healed permanently and completely.

He must first find out as far as possible the whole extent of all the accidents and symptoms belonging to the unknown primitive malady. Afterwards he might be able to discover medicines which may Homoeopathically cover the original disease by means of its peculiar symptoms.

The original malady sought for must also be of a miasmatic, chronic nature.

After it has advanced it can:

• never be removed by the strength of any robust constitution
• never be overcome by the most wholesome diet and order of life
• never die out of itself.

But it is evermore aggravated, from year to year, through a transition into other and more serious symptoms,* even till the end of man’s life, like every other chronic, miasmatic sickness, e. g., the venereal bubo which has not been healed from within by mercury, its specific remedy, but has passed over into venereal disease.

This latter, also, never passes away of itself, but, even with the most correct mode of life and with the most robust bodily constitution, increases every year and unfolds evermore into new and worse symptoms, and this, also, to the end of man’s life.

The obstacle to the cure of many non-venereal cases which seemed delusively like specific, well-defined diseases, and yet could not be cured in a Homoeopathic manner with the then proved medicines, seemed very often to lie in a former eruption of itch, which was not unfrequently confessed; and the beginning of all the subsequent sufferings usually dated from that. time.

So also with similar chronic patients who did not confess such an infection, or, what was probably more frequent, who had, from inattention, not perceived it, or, at least, could not remember it. After a careful inquiry it usually turned out that little traces of it (small pustules of itch, herpes, etc.) had showed themselves with them from time to time, even if but rarely, as an indubitable sign of a former infection of this kind.

• Not unfrequeutly phthisis passes over into in-anity; dried-up ulcers into dropsy or apoplexy; intermittent fever into asthma; affections of the abdomen into pains in the joints or paralysis; pains in the limbs into hemorrhage, etc. and it was not difficult to discover that the later diseases must also have their foundation in the original malady and can only be a part of a far greater whole.

These circumstances, in connection with the fact that innumerable observations of physicians,* and not infrequently my own experience, had shown that

I noticed, as well as other physicians, that an eruption of itch suppressed by faulty practice was followed, in healthy persons by the same or similar symptoms.

These circumstances proves that there is an internal foe. I call it generally as Psora.

For example, the eruption on skin is a sign of the Psora of itch.

I used homeopathic medicines to cure similar chronic diseases, in which the patient was unable to show a like cause.

Most painstaking observations as to the aid afforded by the antipsoric remedies, which were added in the first of these 11 years, have taught me evermore how frequently not only the moderate, but also the more severe and the most severe, chronic diseases are of this origin.

This observation taught me that not only most of the many cutaneous eruptions, which Willan distinguishes with such extreme care from one another, and which have received separate names, but also almost all adventitious formations, from the common wart on the finger up to the largest sarcomatous tumor, from the malformations of the finger-nails up to the swellings of the bones and the curvature of the spine, and many other softenings and deformities of the bones, both at an early and at a more advanced age, are caused by the Psora.

Thousands of tedious ailments of humanity are, with few exceptions, true descendants of this many-formed Psora alone. Examples are:

• frequent epis-taxis
• the accumulation of blood in the veins of the rectum and anus
• discharges of blood from the same (blind or flowing piles)
• hemoptysis, hemateme-sis, hematuria,
• deficient and too frequent menstrual discharges
• nightsweats of several years’ duration
• parchment-like dryness of the skin
• diarrhoea of many years’ standing
• permanent constipation
• long-continued erratic pains
• convulsions occurring repeatedly for a number of years
• chronic ulcers and inflammations
• sarcomatous enlargements and tumors, emaciation
• excessive sensitiveness as well as deficiencies in the senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and feeling
• excessive or extinguished sexual desire
• diseases of the mind and soul
  • from imbecility up to ecstacy
  • from melancholy up to raging insanity
• swoons and vertigo
• the diseases of the heart
• abdominal complaints
• hysteria and hypochondria

The ailments and infirmities of body and soul differ so radically.

Merely descendants of one and the same vast original malady, the almost innumerable symptoms of which form but one whole and are to be regarded and to be medicinally treated as the parts of one and the same disease in the same way as in a great epidemic of typhus fever.

Thus, in the year 1813, one patient would be prostrated with only a few symptoms of this plague, a second patient showed only a few, but different ailments, while a third, fourth, etc., would complain of still other ailments belonging to this epidemic disease, while they were, nevertheless, all sick with one and the same pestilential fever, and the entire and complete image of the typhus fever reigning at the time could only be obtained by gathering together the symptoms of all, or at least of many of these patients.

Then the one or two remedies* found to be homoeopathic healed the whole epidemy, and therefore showed themselves specifically helpful with every patient, though the one might be suffering from symptoms differing from those of others, and almost all seemed to be suffering from different diseases.