Posted October 12th, 2008 by admin
These excrescences ... usually, but not always, attended with a sort of gonorrhoea* from the urethra ...
*The miasm of the other common gonorrhoeas seems not to penetrate the whole organism, but only to locally stimulate the urinary organs. (Hahenmann, Chronic Diseases, p.83)
I'm sorry if I'm driving this point into the ground, but this is vital to an appreciation of the nature of Sycosis, and central to dispelling a misunderstanding which has plagued homeopathic teachings regarding the chronic miasms over the past 160 years.
Sycosis is not related to the disease we today call Gonorrhea; and Medorrhinum - the nosode of Gonorrhea, introduced by Swan in 1842 - is not the nosode of Sycosis.
This is essential, as many historical and contemporary efforts to describe Sycosis, have been based on the pathogenesis of Medorrhinum, on the mistaken assumption that this were the nosode of the primary disease. This has resulted in unfortunate severe distortions in many existing descriptions of the Sycotic miasm.
The term "gonorrhea" is derived from the Greek gones (sex organ) + rrhoia (discharge). In Hahnemann's day, this term referred merely to any discharge from the genitals, and was not used to describe a specific disease in the nosological sense.
The diplococcus bacterium Neisseria gonorrhoeae was first described in 1876, by German physician Albert Neisser, from urethral and conjunctival discharges - 48 years after the publication of Hahnemann's Chronic Diseases, and 33 years after Hahnemann's death. The term "Gonorrhea" at this time, was formally adopted as the specific nosological term for this sexually transmited disease.
Chlamydia trachomatis - responsible for mucupurulent urethritides (gonorrheas) readily clinically confusable with those of Gonorrhea - was first described in 1935, but was only associated with "non-specific urethritis" in the late 1970's.
These - Neisseria gonorrhea and Chlamydia trachomatis - were the "[acute] miasms [i.e., infectious diseases] of the other common gonorrhoeas [which] seem not to penetrate the whole organism, but only to locally stimulate the urinary organs".
Sycosis is "usually, but not always, attended with a sort of [gones + rrhoia]" - but the principal characteristic of the primary disease is the characteristic excresences, "more rarely ... dry and like warts, more frequently soft, spongy, emitting a specifically fetid fluid (sweetish and almost like herring-brine), bleeding easily, and in the form of a coxcomb or a cauliflower. These, with males, sprout forth on the glans and on, or below, the prepuce, but with women, on the parts surrounding the pudenda; and the pudenda themselves, which are then swollen, are covered often by a great number of them." ((Hahnemann, Chronic Diseases, p.83))
From this description, we can clearly recognize Sycosis to be the disease we today call Condyloma accuminata or venereal wart disease, attributed to human papillomavirus (HPV). We don't have a characterized HPV nosode in our materia medica (Samuel Swan did prepare "Verruca menstruo," "menstrual blood from a woman who had warts," but this has had neither proving nor establishment of clinical symptomatology). Hahnemann reported that "the whole sycosis [is] cured most surely and most thoroughly through the internal use of Thuja" ((Hahnemann, Chronic Diseases, p.84)) - suggesting that the pathogenesis of Thuja, in the absence of a characterized nosode, might lend a portrait of Sycosis. Boenninghausen began to assemble just this, in his essays Anamnesis of Sycosis and Special Symptoms of Thuja, both included in the collection of Boenninghausen's Lesser Writings.
