The Virus of Measles.
Introduction
WHAT we are trying to say here is merely tentative. But one has a feeling that the least one can do it to throw out suggestions, trusting that they may, if fertile, germinate in even unforeseen quarters and bear fruit to the common good. This has happened e’er now, when one has joyfully discovered that it is not only “curses and chickens that come home to roost”. But-the seed must be good, and the soil on which it falls, propitious, or-“nothing doing!”
In the past one has foolishly despised MEASLES; scarcely troubling to record its occurrence in the patient’s Past History: for has not nearly everyone had measles? But now, at long last, Morbillinum, with like remedies of “childish diseases”, begins to loom up very big through the mists, in the treatment of Chronic Diseases. So much so, indeed, that one sets one’s teeth and determines that, please God, one will not have any more Old Chronics. Sounds fantastic? -extravagant? We shall see!
Homoeopathy has been taunted before now with its very moderate or non-success in the treatment of certain baffling diseases: and the fact that they are equally baffling everywhere else is no excuse. And now, it is just here that one is glimpsing a faint dawning of day, even in regard to the most terrible and baffling of them all. Hence this pointing finger, trembling with hope.
Let us emphasize once more the fact, that Hahnemann would have none of Old Chronics. When first he realized the stop-spot, in some cases, of the simple remedies of the present complex symptom-picture, he had to know WHY. And when he at length discovered (as he claimed and as would appear) the NATURE of Chronic Disease and its only possible treatment, he was so far ahead of his time as to provoke bitter animosity and scorn among outsiders, and neglect, because of the impossibility, in those days, of proving his contentions, among his own followers. Hence his greatest work (unfinished, as we are beginning to sense it) has been tacitly set aside and neglected.
To start with, let us try, once again, to enunciate and elucidate his later, all-important teachings: carrying them forward (as he must have done had he lived on) on his own lines.
And we will venture to reduce his dicta into terms of to-day. Anyone who desires to verify and explore farther is referred to.
No.12 of our Correspondence Course, published by the B.H.A.; or, better still, to Hahnemann’s own Chronic Diseases, Vol.1.
“All chronic diseases originate and are based upon fixed chronic infections, which enable their parasitical ramifications to spread through the human organism, and to grow without end.”
“Certain diseases, such as small-pox, measles, true scarlet fever, the venereal diseases, the itch of workers in wool, canine rabies, whooping cough, etc., are caused by a peculiar contagium of tolerably fixed character. These are so fixed in their course as to be always recognized. They can be named, and we can endeavour to lay down some fixed in their course as to be always recognized. They can be named, and we can endeavour to lay down some fixed method of treatment suitable, as a rule, for each of them.”
In all these diseases, he tells us, “infection is instantaneous.”
And in all these, after infection, there is an incubation period of varying duration, before the disease comes to the surface with fever, and eruption or cutaneous manifestation capable of communicating the disease.
He asks, “Is there any parasitic disease in the world which, when it has infected from without, does not first make the organism sick, before its external signs manifest themselves? -we can only answer, No: there is none.”
“We find that all infectious diseases which form local affections on the skin, are internal diseases, the last result of which is the local cutaneous affection.”
Some of the above mentioned acute infections are, for him, chronic diseases-syphilis, gonorrhoea, and psora (under which term he masses all non-venereal chronic diseases-epilepsy, asthma, melancholia and insanity, marasmus, diabetes, consumption, cancer, and a long list of inveterate conditions of viscera and special organs of sense. One observes that chronic diseases, for him, persist in varying forms and intensity so long as life lasts, unless cured by remedies homoeopathic to the original disease. Whereas the others, seemingly acute merely, after running their course of about two or three weeks, end in a crisis by means of which the fever, together with the eruption, are annihilated in the system, and the patient either dies of these diseases, or else recovers. “They have the peculiar nature of becoming extinct in. the body.”
He reiterates, “The chronic infections are semi-vital infections of a parasitical nature, which can only be neutralized and anti- doted by a more powerful remedy producing analogous effects.”
He shows that everything, alike in the acute and chronic diseases, follows precisely the same course, the only difference being in their outcome: and it is only here that we, with later. experience, part company with him, in order to travel a stage further in his wake.
Because we now know certain facts: that some of the apparently acute diseases may not be “annihilated”, but, only partially overcome: may become latent; modifying healthy reactions against sickness and injury, which thenceforward are not normally recovered from. For instance, a man, during his occupation, experiences frequent or constant pressure on bone. If he suffers from some latent, once acute, now chronic infection, such as syphilis, he develops a syphilitic necrosis. Another, in apparently perfect health, experiences a compound fracture; the bone refuses to unite and the wound to heal. Pus is examined, and the organism of typhoid is found; he having had enteric thirty or forty years previously.* Opium cit., p.371. A knock on the breast, or the pressure of a pipe stem, instead of being easily and speedily dealt with by the healthy organism, indurates, proliferates, results in a carcinoma. Why? Probably, because of some latent chronic condition, once an acute disease, never wholly recovered from, which, as Hahnemann expresses it, “ultimates” there; and, not only prevents normal healing, but possibly, by supplying irritation, may determine an abnormal flow of blood to the part, and encourage irregular proliferation which entails pressure, and leads to atrophy of adjacent parts-the whole spelling malignancy. This theory suggests itself; and is perhaps more plausible than most of the much-sought causes of cancer: where the only fact universally agreed upon is that cancer generally has trauma as a localizing agent. But-think! that which healthy nature hastens most successfully to deal with, is trauma. “Healthy”- i.e. not subject to some once acute, now latent, chronic disease.
We have too long neglected the instructions and deductions of Hahnemann in this matter of chronic disease; thus throwing away a very large portion of our heritage from that inspired Teacher and Healer. “Inspired? there are people who recoil from the word. And yet, it is noteworthy that, again and again, it is the scientists who claim inspiration for Hahnemann. How else, they demand, could he have enunciated, so unerringly, much of that which modern science is, bit by bit, elucidating?
Inspiration?-has wireless, then, nothing to teach us about inspiration-if only by analogy? One remembers how, in childhood, it used to be so puzzling-the Word came to this one or that, who accepted, sometimes most unwillingly, the message; constrained to pass it on, that those who had ears might hear. May it not be that the Word is always broadcast?-and yet only clear to those- prophets-poets-musicians-scientists-who are Receivers? This has again and again been apprehended; and yet generally missed.
Browning, for instance:-
“God has a few of us whom He whispers in the ear;
The rest may reason and welcome: ‘this we musicians know.”
Kipling, again, in his marvellous Explorer:-
“Till a voice as bad as Conscience, rang interminable changes
On one everlasting Whisper day and night repeated-so;
Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges
Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you.
Go!’
“God took care to hide that country till He judged His people ready,
Then He chose me for his Whisper, and I’ve found it, and it’s yours!
“Yes, your ‘Never-never country’-yes, your ‘edge of cultivation’ And ‘no sense in going further’-till I crossed the range to see. God forgive me! No, I didn’t. It’s God’s present to our nation, Anybody might have found it, but-His Whisper came to Me!”
Rhodesia, probably? :-but the same thing has happened again and again through the centuries, as we were reminded the other day in the Evening Standard, by Stephen Williams, in regard to “the beggar who found a new world”, Christopher Columbus.
“`Man is an instrument that must work until it breaks in the hands of providence, which uses it for its own purposes. As long as the body is able, the Spirit must be willing.
