Posted October 2nd, 2008 by admin
Disease classification (nosology) was, quite obviously, very different in Hahnemann's day than it is today. Notably, this was true for the venereal diseases which Hahnemann identified as being at the core of much of the chronic disease he was seeing in practice.
In the 18th century, conventional medical nosology described a single venereal "disease" which likely encompassed the various venereal infections we know today. Hahnemann was at the forefront of recognizing that these actually represented more than one unique disease process.
In 1789 - a year before Hahnemann's "eureka" experiment with Cinchona bark which launched his explorations of homeopathy - Hahnemann wrote a booklet, Instructions for Surgeons respecting venereal diseases, together with a new mercurial preparation - in which he introduced a mercurial preparation for the treatment of syphilis (which later became adapted to homeopathic use as the Mercurius solubilis of our practice), and meticulously described the venereal infections seen in his day.
He very clearly described 3 distinct venereal diseases, each in great detail -
"Trippen" (German for "drip") - characterized by a purulent urethral/cervical discharge; which likely encompassed what we know today as gonorrhea, chlamydia and the nonspecific urethritises;
Syphilis - characterized by the well-known primary chancre;
Fig-wart disease - characterized by pedunculated fig-like or cocks-comb-like genital lesions; which we recognize today as condyloma accuminata, or HPV (human papilloma virus). He later described this disease as "Sycosis" ("fig-like," from the Greek "sykon" for fig).
I'm emphasizing this here, for two purposes -
[1] to recognize Hahnemann's cleverness in discerning the distinctions between Syphilis and Sycosis (fig-wart disease), which formed the basis of two of his chronic miasmatic diseases;
[2] to emphasize that Sycosis (fig-wart disease) is not gonorrhea - but rather is a distinct venereal disease (which, from Hahnemann's detailed description of it, we can easily recognize to be condyloma accuminata, or HPV/human papilloma virus infection).
There is no real mistaking of this - Hahnemann described both conditions quite clearly, and his description of Sycosis is clearly distinct from his equally detailed description of "Trippen" (which encompasses the disease we today call gonorrhea). This becomes centrally important when we take up the study of the Sycotic miasm. There is much confusion regarding this in our literature, which frequently equates Sycosis erroneously with the disease we today call Gonorrhea - and contributes to the confusion that Hahnemann predicted in his prophetic letter to Stapf.
