Disease is defined as the lack of bodily ease; an ailment or malady. There are, of course, numerous causes, some close or immediate and some remote, even congenital or inherited. Hahnemann in his Organon has given an explanation of the cause of disease by his hypothesis of the three disease miasms which underlie all disease and permit its development.
Thus he explains the occurrence of both acute and chronic disease. He also gave us an explanation of what is chronic disease and the basic difference between acute and chronic diseases. Acute diseases run their prescribed course and end in death or in cure, while chronic disease tends toward death through all its manifestations unless and until cured by a similar disease or similar remedy.
Philosophers throughout the ages have thought and conjectured about the causes of disease. For disease in its various manifestations has been afflicting the race since earliest recorded history and beyond. Hahnemann, more than any other man, has brought some order and understanding of the proximate causes of disease by his theory of the three miasms: psora, syphilis and sycosis, which he taught passed on from generation to generation and gave rise to all disease.
Of these three, psora gave rise to the greatest diversity and multiplicity of diseases both acute and chronic. Psora is the underlying disease condition due to maltreated or mistreated itching eruptions of the skin. Psora is protean in manifestation and may show itself in any one of many disease entities.
Many doctors do not accept Hahnemanns psoric theory nor believe that even syphilis or sycosis are important in disease causation for more that the first or second generation after the acute infection. Of those who do accept Hahnemanns three miasms there are some who believe that a fourth, a tubercular miasms, should be added. This tubercular miasm or cryptogenic tubercular taint is the soil in which grows malignancies such as cancer.
Active tuberculosis is well under control, but this is a hidden disease tendency which may assume many forms and manifestations of mental and physical disease all of which are deep-seated and difficult to cure even homoeopathically.
But what precedes or predisposes to these various miasms? What is it that makes us subject to disease? Something much more basic than poor hygiene, diet, or even lack of vitamins.
In the introduction to the Organon, Hahnemann writes, “As long as men have existed they have been liable individually or collectively to diseases from physical or moral causes.” Please note that he apparently gives equal emphasis to moral as to physical causes. Further on he says, “For as far the greatest number of diseases are of dynamic (spiritual) origin and dynamic (spiritual) nature, their cause is therefore not perceptible to the senses”.
To quote another authority. If defect or fault there be in body humors it arises from ourselves–from the intemperance of our appetites, the unbridled excess of our passions and their collision with the affections of the mind and soul and from very numerous other causes. (Emanuel Swedenborg, The Animal Kingdom.).
Evil closes the smallest and altogether invisible vessels of which the next greater vessels which are also invisible are composed; hence, comes the first and inmost obstruction and hence the first and inmost vitiation of the blood; this vitiation, when it increases, causes disease and at length death. (Emanuel Swedenborg, Arcana Coelestia 5726.).
All diseases of the body whatsoever recognize some corresponding sickness in the animus, and corresponding to this, an affection or change of state in the mind. But although they correspond they are not therefore to be denominated in the same way; as neither are diseases themselves. They are called diseases in the body; sickness and passions in the animus; changes or perverse states in the mind; guilt in the soul. The pain which is in the body is called anxiety in the animus; evil conscience in the mind; hell in the soul.
Bilious fevers in the body are anger, fury, resentment in the animus, burning hatred in the mind. The one also excites the other. Paralysis in the body corresponds to foolishness in the animus, and to fluctuation of the will and lack of the power of determination in the mind. So also in the other diseases. But there is no way of setting forth the correspondences of all the diseases until the nature of each has been explored. (Emanuel Swedenborg, Diseases of the Fibre, 1742.).
So the interrelationship of the mind or soul and the body or psychosomatic disease is not new or recent but antedates Hahnemann and Homoeopathy. Hahnemann was born in 1755 and Swedenborg died in 1772. At the time when Swedenborg wrote The Animal Kingdom and The Fibre he was striving to locate and demonstrate the immortal soul in the physical body. Many years of study of anatomy and physiology were devoted to this end.
For even in his time there was a rising tide of atheism and materialism, especially among the scientists and the intelligentia. Swedenborg hoped to demonstrate the existence of the soul and its place of abode in the human body. To this end he wrote The Economy of the Animal Kingdom and later The Animal Kingdom, also The Cerebrum. The Fibre (i.e. the nerve fibre). The Five Senses and The Brain. Shortly afterwards he allowed his studies of anatomy and physiology to lapse as he became the Revelator of Divine Truth and wrote many volumes of theology.
