Although, by the discovery of that great source of chronic diseases, as also by the discovery of the specific homoeopathic remedies for the psora, medicine has advanced some steps nearer to a knowledge of the nature of the majority of diseases it has to cure, yet, for settling the indication in each case of chronic (psoric) diseases he is called on to cure, the duty of a careful apprehension of its ascertainable symptoms and characteristics is as indispensable for the homoeopathic physician as it was before that discovery, as no real cure of this or of other diseases can take place without a strict particular treatment (individualisation) of each case of disease only that in this investigation some difference is to be made when the affection is an acute and rapidly developed disease, and when it is a chronic one; seeing that, in acute disease, the chief symptoms strike us and become evident to the senses more quickly, and hence much less time is requisite for tracing the picture of the disease and much fewer questions are required to be asked, for as almost everything is self-evident, than is a chronic disease which has been gradually progressing for several years, in which the symptoms are much more difficult to be ascertained.
From all this it is clear that these useless and misused names of diseases ought to have no influence on the practice of the true physician, who knows that he has to judge of and to cure diseases, not according to the similarity of the name of a single one of their symptoms, but according to the totality of the signs of the individual state of each particular patient, whose affection it is his duty carefully to investigate; but never to give a hypothetical guess at it.
If, however, it is deemed necessary sometimes to make use of names diseases, in order, when talking about a patient to ordinary persons, to render ourselves intelligible in few words, we ought only to employ them as collective names, and tell them, e.g. the patient has a kind of St. Vitus's dance, of dropsy, kind of typhus, a kind of ague; but (in order to do away once for all with the mistaken, notions these names give rise to) we should never say he has the St. Vitus's dance the typhus, the dropsy, ague, as there are certainly no diseases of these and similar names of fixed unvarying character.
Hence the following directions for investigating of symptoms are only partially applicable for acute diseases.