MANY observers in all schools have noticed certain tendencies to particular disease-manifestations in certain types of individuals, and among those who have succeeded in reducing the different forms to specific types there is a fairly unanimous selection of the number THREE.
After years of patient observation Hahnemann saw that a superficial symptom-resemblance between drug-symptoms and disease-symptoms was sometimes insufficient to show the true specific correspondence. Eventually he tracked down the underlying constitutional dyscrasiae to the three “miasms,” and he named them, Syphilis, Sycosis and Psora. The first of these was due to the initial sore of the chancre, the second to the constitutional effects of gonorrhoea and the third to the chronic effects of gonorrhoea and the third to the chronic effects of itch poisoning. The three typical remedies indicated in three dyscrasiae were (1) Mercury, (2) Thuja, (3) Sulphur. These were the typical remedies of each of the three classes.
Bazin again reduces all chronic diseases to three forms: Scrofula, Gout, and Syphilis, from which he thinks that all other pathological forms originate.
Rademacher again, also found a three-fold division. His division was an aetiological or causative one, and varied as the peculiar cause at work. In some epidemics one type would rule and the remedy for that type would be Copper. At another season a somewhat different type would prevail and for that Iron would be needed; for a third again Cubic Nitre or Natrum Nitricum would be the remedy. And each of these remedies had allied remedies of its own type.
Grauvogl, who did not deny the value of these classifications, did not find that any of them went far enough or deep enough. So he re-stated them in terms of the tissues themselves. He also widened their borders.
It was through Hahnemann’s insistence on the necessity of observing Concomitant Circumstances in relation to symptoms that Grauvogl was led to make his great generalization. In the practice of Homoeopathy it makes all the difference whether a symptom is worse or better in hot weather or cold, wet or dry, summer or winter. Grauvogl with his critical and analytical instincts asked himself what these conditions meant in the organism. Being well versed in chemistry, he asked himself what changes in the organism took place differently under these different conditions and he tracked them down in the first place to the changes that take place in the blood in respiration.
The animal body, solid as it looks, is made up in two thirds of its bulk of water. “It (water) is used for keeping up the physical properties of the body, and renders function and nutrition possible. It is a universal solvent chemically employed for dissolving solid substances and mechanically as a carrier of the insoluble. Water is lacking in no part of the organism and it is in relation to the manifold solid matters its most universal unit. The whole nutrition consists in the new formation of hydrates for supplying the place of that which is dissolved and excreted, and forms by that alone an immense source of heat; the water of the body absorbs all kinds of gases and thus alone respiration and access of oxygen becomes possible. Every process of combustion is preceded by a polarisation of oxygen. Ozone vanishes in the combinations which arise as products of combustion; the antozone (positively electrified ozone) remains with the water for which it has an affinity. The water can also supply the place of acids and bases, and is amphoter (both), and with a mixed food oxygen is expired, which is followed at the expense of the oxygen contained in the carbohydrates, while with the exhaled hydrogen a small quantity of peroxide of hydrogen is mixed. Water maintains the equilibrium of the normal temperature of the organism, while neither the blood nor the nerve centres alone regulate the production of heat.” (I.P. 116.)
Respiration is a function which is not confined to the lungs, all parts of the body respire and consequently oxygen is found in all organs and tissues, sometimes as ozone (neutral) and sometimes as antozone (positive). The air we breathe is composed of Oxygen, Carbon, Hydrogen and Nitrogen, of which the whole organism is composed and which are even contained free in the blood. Thus changes of the atmospheric constituents affect the constant whole of the organism.
It is in this conception as explaining Hahnemann’s observation of the effect of the various seasons and climatic conditions on patients and drug-provers that Grauvogl’s arrangement of the Constitutions is based.
“The Homoeopath abstracts first from the symptoms the individuality of the patients in connection with the state of the outer world in which they have existed from their birth and out of which the bodily constitution is developed. The bodily constitution is hence the general cause.”
Grauvogl made the true observation that if the organism. “If, for example, a patient with intermittent fever, even before his sickness, was always affected by damp weather, he is not cured, even though the last paroxysm occurred years ago, so long as he does not feel quite as well in damp as in dry weather.
“Or, if a patient who has been for a long time annoyed by this circumstance that every draught of air affects him unpleasantly, he is not cured, even if, for instance, many years have elapsed since he recovered from his last pneumonia. As long as the disposition to take cold is not removed from him, every relapse to which he is exposed under such circumstances is proof of the still present conditions for the same or a similar disease, and hence a proof that he is not wholly cured.
“Such constitutional conditions which make themselves known by such accompanying circumstances, give us, hence, the only right indications.”
No further elaboration is needed in order to show how the mind of von Grauvogl worked to map out the “generals” and to find the basic remedies for the constitutions out of which arose such a multiplicity of apparently different manifestations of one and the same disease.
As a sample of that I may refer to Case IX, p.57, in which he treated by correspondence a well-known colleague of his own, and I should like to ask any strict Hahnemannian if he thinks that even Dr. Kent himself could have found the smile simillimum for that plethora of symptoms.
Before passing on to a consideration of the three constitutions themselves there are one or two pregnant passages which is well to put on record here.
“Every living organism moves within oscillatory rhythm within various spaces of time from one position of equipoise to another. We see this in the rhythm of the motions of our solar system even, and in its influence excited through the movements of the moon and the earth upon ourselves. But no oscillatory rhythm of life remains the same; it never returns again to the point which it last reached.” (200.)
I have put on the title page a sentence from Paracelsus which might have been used as a text for the following:
“To understand a disease or a cure is utterly impossible if one does not know the history of its development. But where is the historic knowledge with regard to Pathology and Therapeutics which possesses the key to these histories of development? No Clinic speaks thereof. The lectures of the Professors are silent.” (290.)
“Acute disease run their course so to say in the track marked out by the bodily constitutions.” (291.).
