Miasms & Their Homeopathic Perspective

The word, ‘miasm,’ in Dr Hahnemann’s seminal perspective, is much more than an infectious principle, which, when taken into the organism, may set up a specific disease, among other things.

- Dr John Henry Clarke

By ‘chronic disease,’ Dr Samuel Hahnemann, MD, the founder of homeopathy, did not mean exactly the same thing as is now generally understood by the phrase — a disease that lasts a long time and is incurable.

To make his meaning clear, I cannot do better than quote Dr Hahnemann’s own definition of acute and chronic diseases, from paragraph 72 of his Organon: “The diseases to which is liable are either rapid morbid processes of the abnormally deranged vital force, which have a tendency to finish their course more or less quickly, but always in a moderate time — these are termed acute diseases; or, they are diseases of such a character that, with small, often imperceptible beginnings, dynamically derange the living organism, each in its own peculiar manner, and cause it to deviate from the healthy condition in such a way that the automatic life energy, called vital force, whose office it is to preserve health, only opposes to them at the commencement and during their progress, imperfect, unsuitable, useless resistance, but must helplessly suffer [them to spread and] itself to be more and more abnormally deranged, until at length the organism is destroyed; these are termed chronic diseases. They are caused by infection from a chronic miasm.”

THE INFECTIOUS PRINCIPLE

By ‘miasm’ Dr Hahnemann means an infectious principle, which, when taken into the organism, may set up a specific disease. According to Dr Hahnemann, there were not only miasms of acute disease, like the infectious principle of scarlatina, for example, but also of chronic diseases. Among the latter, he recognised three: syphilis, sycosis and psora.