Posted November 3rd, 2008 by admin
from Samuel Hahnemann, The Chronic Diseases; pp. 37-39
... the miasma of the itch needs only touch the general skin, especially with tender children. The disposition for being affected with the miasma of itch is found with almost everyone and under almost all circumstances, which is not the case with the other two miasmata.
No other chronic miasma infects more generally, more surely, more easily and more absolutely than the miasma of itch; as already stated, it is the most contagious of all. It is communicated so easily, that even the physician, hurrying from one patient to another, in feeling the pulse has unconsciously inoculated other patients with it; wash which is infected with the itch; new gloves which had been tried on by an itch patient, a strange lodging place, a strange towel used for drying oneself have communicated this tinder of contagion; yea, often a babe, when being born, is infected while passing through the organs of the mother, who may be infected (as is not infrequently the case) with this disease; or the babe receives this unlucky infection through the hand of the midwife, which has been infected by another parturient woman (or previously); or, again, a suckling may be infected by its nurse, or, while on her arm, by her caresses or the caresses of a strange person with unclean hands; not to mention the thousands of other possible ways in which things polluted with this invisible miasma may touch a man in the course of his life, and which often can in no way be anticipated or guarded against, so that men who have never been infected by the psora are the exception. We need not to hunt for the causes of infection in crowded hospitals, factories, prisons, or in orphan houses, or in the filthy huts of paupers; even in active life, in retirement, and in the rich classes, the itch creep in. The hermit on Montserrat escapes it as rarely in his rocky cell, as the little prince in his swaddling clothes of cambric.
As soon as the miasma of itch, e. g., touches the hand, in the moment when it has taken effect, it no more remains local. Henceforth all washing and cleansing or the spot avail nothing. Nothing is seen on the skin during the first days; it remains unchanged, and, according to appearance, healthy. There is no eruption or itching to be noticed on the body during these days, not even on the spot infected. The nerve which was first affected by the miasma has already communicated it in an invisible dynamic manner to the nerves of the rest of the body, and the living organism has at once, all unperceived, been so penetrated by this specific excitation, that it has been compelled to appropriate this miasma gradually to itself until the change of the whole being to a man thoroughly psoric, and thus the internal development of the psora, has reached completion.
Only when the whole organism feels itself transformed by this peculiar chronic-miasmatic disease, the diseased vital force endeavors to alleviate and to soothe the internal malady through the establishment of a suitable local symptom on the skin, the itch-vesicles. So long as this eruption continues in its normal form, the internal psora, with its secondary ailments, cannot break forth, but must remain covered, slumbering, latent and bound.
Usually it takes six, seven or ten, perhaps even fourteen days from the moment of infection before the transformation of the entire internal organism into psora has been effected. Then only, there follows after a slight or more severe chill in the evening and a general heat, followed by perspiration in the following night, (a little fever which by many persons is ascribed to a cold and therefore disregarded), the outbreak of the vesicles of itch, at first fine as if from miliary fever, but afterwards enlarging on the skin* - first in the region of the spot first infected, and, indeed, accompanied with a voluptuously tickling itching which may be called unbearably agreeable (Grimmen), which compels the patient so irresistibly to rub and to scratch the vesicles of itch, that, if a person restrains himself forcibly from rubbing or scratching, a shudder passes over the skin of the whole body. This rubbing and scratching indeed satisfies somewhat for a few moments, but there then follows immediately a long-continued burning of the part affected. Late in the evening and before midnight this itching is most frequent and most unbearable.
*Far from being an independent, merely local, cutaneous disease the vesicles or pustules of itch are the reliable proof that the completion of the internal psora has already been effected, and the eruption is merely an integrating factor of the same; for this peculiar eruption and this peculiar itching make a part of the essence of the whole disease in its natural, least dangerous state.
The vesicles of itch contain in the first hours of their formation a lymph clear as water, but this quickly changes into pus, which fills the tip of the vesicle.
The itching not only compels the patient to rub, but on account of its violence, as before mentioned, to rub and scratch open the vesicles; and the humor pressed out furnishes abundant material for infecting the surroundings of the patient and also other persons not yet infected. The extremities defiled even to an imperceptible degree with this lymph, so also the wash, the clothes and the utensils of all kinds, when touched, propagate the disease.
