Chronic Disease, installment 16

Chronic Miasms?

Having given the topic of chronic disease a rest (for now), I feel the need to revisit it, to ask whether we might accept Hahnemann’s notion that the origin of all chronic disease is of “miasmatic” (infectious) origin? I suspect I already hinted at my perspective on this in installment 15 of this series, but wish to elaborate on it further.

I hesitate to question Hahnemann’s skill in observation or his discernment. Others (Robert Ellis Dudgeon in particular) have attributed Hahnemann’s later work to senility, tho this in part was fueled by their misunderstandings of the proposed nature of Psora, erroneously believing he was referencing scabies. Hahnemann evidenced no signs of cognitive decline prior to his eventual succumbing to what appears to have been Influenzal bronchopneumonia at age 88.

But he did challenge us to exercise discernment. The motto above the gate of the school he attended as a child was “Aude sapere (sapere = Latin, “to be wise,” from Proto-Indo-European “to discern,” “to know the difference”), the motto adopted by Kant to represent the Age of Enlightemnent, and he adopted this on the dedication page of the 2nd edition of his Organon. Hahnemann’s core mission was to challenge the dogma that was restraining medical thought in his day, and I suspect the last thing he’d wish would be to be regarded as a source of dogma himself.

Respecting that, and recognizing that Hahnemann was working within the constraints of the knowledge of his day (1755-1843), I’d suggest it’s reasonable to revisit the question of the nature of chronic disease that preoccupied Hahnemann’s inestimable intellectual efforts and observations during his years in Köthen & Paris.