Posted September 30th, 2008 by admin
There is tremendous confusion about the chronic miasms among homeopaths and peri-homeopathic practitioners - both in contemporary and historical practice.
Hahnemann wrote the following letter to his colleague Stapf, in Sept. 1827, accompanying the manuscript of his Chronic Diseases, the text in which he set out his observations regarding the chronic miamatic diseases:
You and Gross are the only ones to whom I have revealed this matter. Just think what a start you will have in advance of all other physicians in the world! At least a year will elapse before the others get my book; they will then require more than six months to recover from the shock and astonishment at the monstrous and unheard things, perhaps another six months before they believe in it … Hence three years from now will elapse before they can do anything useful with it.
History has suggested that Hahnemann's estimates were off by a factor of around 100.
Kent (c.1900') was not very helpful here - in his Lectures on Homeopathic Philosophy, he equated Psora with "original sin," and the venereal chronic miasms with sinful sexual misconduct; notions that arose out of Kent's Swedenborgian religious philosophy and his own issues with sexuality, and not out of Hahnemann's careful studies on the nature of chronic disease.
John Henry Allen, in his text The Chronic Miasms (1908), again injected the "original sin" notion into Psora, and veered rather far from Hahnemann's observations on numerous points.
The entire topic was largely ignored in the North American homeopathic re-birth of the 1980's. Vithoulkas, a leader in this rebirth, paid very little attention to the chronic miasms in his teachings, and this perspective has influenced most of the teachings in North American homeopathy to date.
Yet an understanding of the chronic miasms - the true nature of chronic disease - can be of tremendous assistance in working with chronic cases, as well as with most of the apparently-acute manifestations of chronic disharmony that we see in daily practice.
