Curiosities of Medical Experience

by J. G. Millingen

Had Hahnemann given a better system of nosology than those we possess, and with his truly praiseworthy zeal and industry enumerated the various symptoms of disease as minutely and as accurately as he has recorded the effects of medicinal substances, his labours might have proved a most valuable addition to our store of knowledge.

Let us now direct our attention to the absurdities to which these opinions have led. Solely attentive to effects, and heedless of the disorganization of various important parts of the human economy which morbid anatomy detects, Hahnemann endeavours to discover the occult causes—the original source—the germ—of the malady, which most likely are beyond the reach of our researches; and he boldly affirms that all chronic diseases spring from syphilis, a disposition to warts and the itch. Now experience has proved that such an assumption is unfounded. The most healthy subjects, those who attain the finest old age, are more liable to this disgusting affection than the wealthy and cleanly part of the community. The Irish and Scotch peasantry from their infancy, and through life, are most subject to psora; and certainly our soldiers and sailors, amongst whom the disease is common, are not more predisposed to chronic diseases than any other classes of society, of course not taking into consideration the effects of unhealthy climates.

Syphilis, it will be readily granted, has a considerable share in producing anomalous sequelæ, more especially when in combination with mercury. Warts, except of a syphilitic character, were never known to germinate diseases; indeed, they affect the most healthy and robust individuals. Yet to these three miasmatic causes does Hahnemann attribute nearly every disease that was ever known to afflict mankind; while he passes over in silence the predisposition to scrofula, gout, rheumatism, to which we can unfortunately trace with too much certainty the source of much human misery.

That the itch is a disease of great antiquity is a matter of doubt. It has been maintained that it is the same eruptive disorder described by Celsus under the appellation of scabies; yet this writer does not allude to its contagious nature, and moreover says, that in some cases it disappears completely, whereas in others it is renewed at certain periods of the year.

Celsus, moreover, includes other forms of pustular eruptions among the different species of scabies, not sufficiently distinguishing them from each other. The character of his scabies is more analogous to the lichen agrius of Willan.

Nor did the ancients consider their psora as our itch. It appears to have been the scaly tetter, which they sometimes denominated psoriasis, at others lepra, a synonymous affection; but neither pustular nor vesicular. Leprosy, indeed, is a malady totally distinct from the itch in all its characters. Hahnemann asserts that the species of leprosy that afflicted the Jews, and which is described by their legislator in the 13th chapter of Leviticus, was the itch; but any one who will peruse this description will perceive that it does not bear the slightest resemblance to that disorder. It appears, on the contrary, to have been that kind of leprosy called leucé by the ancients. Nor was leprosy constantly attended with itching, one of the chief characteristics of the malady, and from which sensation it derives its very name. Hippocrates mentions a leprosy that usually occasioned a prurience before rain. There are no diseases in the classification of which more obscurity exists than in cutaneous affections; and Hahnemann’s ideas would tend to increase this confusion, since he tells us that he considers the frambœsia of America, the sibbens of Norway, the pellagra of Lombardy, the plica of Poland, the pseudo-syphilis of the English, and the asthenia Virginiensis of Virginia, complications of his three miasmatic principles; and he further informs us, no doubt on the faith of some idle tradition, that psora lost its external deformity on the return of the Crusaders, who brought from the Holy Land the use of linen shirts, a cleanly and salutary precaution that eradicated the disease at a period when France had no less than two thousand hospitals for the reception of itch patients,—a plain proof that he confounds leprosy with itch, since the hospitals he alludes to were distinctly considered leper-houses.

It is certainly true that there does exist in our system a constant predisposition to eruptive affections of some kind or other. We are born heirs to certain exanthematic affections, such as the measles and smallpox; and it would be as difficult to find a being morally immaculate as an individual free from speck or blemish. Many of these eruptions are considered of a critical and salutary nature; and the ancients fancied that nature relieved herself by throwing upon the surface some “peccant humours.” Hence their dread of the retrocession of any of these “breakings out;” and there is no doubt but that accidents frequently followed their sudden disappearance, in the same manner as drying up an issue or a blister established for some time, and become habitual, may occasion internal mischief; but to maintain that all chronic diseases arise from three eruptive principles is a most gratuitous and untenable assertion.

Enthusiastically anxious to support his doctrines, Hahnemann is frequently led into erroneous assertions. Thus he tells us that life will suddenly cease if a little water, or the mildest liquid, is injected into a vein; whereas experience has proved, in the treatment of cholera, and various other instances, that the most stimulating solutions may be thus introduced, not only with impunity, but with salutary results.

It is needless to enter more deeply into the ungracious business of pointing out errors, many of which were evident to Hahnemann himself; since, not only in the several editions of his Organon, but in various paragraphs in the same volume, he contradicts himself.

A much more gratifying and important task is now undertaken, to prove, by the evidence of facts, supported by practical reasoning, that the art of healing is more indebted to the homœopathic doctrines than to any system that has hitherto been delivered in our schools.