John Henry Allen, author of The Chronic Miasms, suggested describing Tubercular disease as “pseudopsora,” an awkward “hereditary marriage of Psora & Syphilis.” Writing in 1908, 26 years after Robert Koch’s demonstration of Mycobacterium tiuberrculosis as the infectious agent of Tuberculosis, Allen had no excuse other than his ignorance & theosophically-driven rejection of germ theory to attribute Tuberculosis or “tubercular disease” to any such montage. (There is more to say on this, which I’ll get to in a future installment). We’ve seen similar unfounded speculation today, that the dread diseases AIDS & Lyme Disease might be derived somehow from Syphilis, the dread disease of the 16th-early 20th centuries.
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