Aphorism 206

Before commencing the treatment of a chronic disease, it is necessary to make the most careful investigation (Note: In investigations of this nature we must not allow ourselves to be deceived by the assertions of the patients or their friends, who frequently assign as the cause of chronic, even of the severest and most inveterate diseases, either a cold caught a thorough wetting, drinking cold water after being heated many years ago, or a former fright, a sprain, a vexation sometimes even a bewitchment, &c. These causes are much too insignificant to develop a chronic disease in a healthy body, to keep it up for years, and to aggravate it year by year, as is the case with all chronic diseases from developed psora. Causes of much more important character than these remembered noxious influences must lie at the root of the initiation and progress of a serious, obstinate disease of long standing the assigned causes could only rouse into activity the latent chronic miasm) as to whether the patient has had a venereal infection (for an infection with condylomatous gonorrhoea); for then the treatment must be directed towards this alone, when only the signs of syphilis (or of the rarer condylomatous disease) are present, but this disease is very seldom met with alone nowadays. If such infection have previously occurred, this must also be borne in mind in the treatment of those cases in which psora is present, because in them the latter is complicated with the former, as is always the case when the symptoms are not those of pure syphilis; for when the physician thinks he has a case of old venereal disease before him, he has always, or almost always, to treat a syphilitic affection accompanied mostly by (complicated with) psora, for internal itch dyscrasia (the psora) is far the most frequent (most certain) fundamental cause of chronic disease, either united (complicated) with syphilis (or with sycosis), if the latter infections have avowedly occurred; or, as is much more frequently the case, psora is the sole fundamental cause of all other chronic maladies, whatever names they may bear, which are, moreover, so often bungled, increased and disfigured to a monstrous extent by allopathic unskillfulness.