CHAPTER II. – THE MORBID CONSITUTIONS ACCORDING TO VARIOUS AUTHORS. – CONSTITUTIONAL MEDICINE With especial reference to The Three Constitutions of Dr Von Grauvogl by John H. Clarke

CHAPTER II. – THE MORBID CONSITUTIONS ACCORDING TO
VARIOUS AUTHORS.

     Many observers in all
schools have noticed certain tendencies to particular
disease-manifestations in certain types of individuals, and among those
who have succeeded in reducing the different forms to specific types
there is a fairly unanimous selection of the number Three.

     After years of patient
observation Hahnemann saw that a superficial symptom-resemblance between
drug-symptoms and disease-symptoms was sometimes insufficient to show
the true specific correspondence. Eventually he tracked down the
underlying constitutional dyscrasić to the three “miasms”,
and he named them, Syphilis, Sycosis and Psora. The first of these was
due to the initial sore of the chancre, the second to the constitutional
effects of gonorrhśa and the third to the chronic effects of itch
poisoning. The three typical remedies indicated in the three dyscrasić
were (1)

Mercury,
(2) Thuja,
(3) Sulphur.
These were the typical remedies of each of the three classes.

     Bazin again reduces all
chronic diseases to

three
forms : Scrofula, Gout,
and Syphilis, from which he thinks that all other pathological forms
originate.

     Rademacher again, also
found a three-fold division. His division was an ćtiological or
causative one, and varied as the peculiar cause at work In some
epidemics one type would rule and the remedy for that type would be

Copper.
At another season a somewhat different type would prevail and for that Iron
would be needed ; for a third again Cubic
Nitre or Natrum
Nitricum would be the remedy.
And each of these remedies had allied remedies of its own type.

     Grauvogl, who did not
deny the value of these classifications, did not find that any of them
went far enough or deep enough. so he re-stated them in terms of the
tissues themselves. He also widened their borders.

     It was through
Hahnemann’s insistence on the necessity of observing

Concomitant
Circumstances in relation to
symptoms that Grauvogl was led to make his great generalisation. In the
practice of Homśopathy it makes all the difference whether a symptom is
worse
or better
in hot weather or cold, wet or dry, summer or winter. Grauvogl with his
critical and analytical instincts asked himself what these conditions
meant in the organism. Being well versed in chemistry, he asked himself
what changes in the organism took place differently under these
different conditions and he tracked them down in the first place to the
changes that take place in the blood in respiration.

     The animal body, solid
as if looks, is made up in two-thirds of its bulk of water. “It
(water) is used for keeping up the physical properties of the body, and
renders function and nutrition possible. It is a universal solvent
chemically employed for dissolving solid substances and mechanically as
a carrier of the insoluble. Water is lacking in no part of the organism
and it is in relation to the manifold solid matters its most universal
unit. The whole nutrition consists in the new formation of

hydrates
for supplying the place of that which is dissolved and excreted, and
forms by that alone an immense source
of heat ; the water of
the body absorbs all
kinds of gases and thus alone
respiration and access of oxygen becomes possible. Every process of
combustion is preceded by a polarisation
of oxygen. Ozone vanishes in
the combinations which arise as products of combustion ; the
antozone (positively electrified ozone) remains with the water for which
it has an affinity. The water can also supply the place of acids and
bases, and is amphoteric (both), and with a mixed food oxygen is
expired, which is followed at the expense of the oxygen contained in the
carbohydrates, while with the exhaled hydrogen a small quantity of peroxide
of hydrogen is mixed. Water
maintains the equilibrium of the normal temperature of the organism,
while neither the blood nor the nerve centres alone regulate the
production of heat.” (I. p. 116).

     Respiration is a
function which is not confined to the lungs, all parts of the body
respire and consequently oxygen is found in all organs and tissues,
sometimes as ozone (neutral) and sometimes as antozone (positive). The
air we breathe is composed of Oxygen, Carbon, Hydrogen and Nitrogen, of
which the whole organism is composed and which are even contained free
in the blood. Thus changes of the atmospheric constituents affects the
constant whole of the organism.

     It is in this
conception as explaining Hahnemann’s observation of the effect of the
various seasons and climatic conditions on patients and drug-provers
that Grauvogl’s arrangement of the Constitutions is based. “The Homśopath

abstracts
first from the symptoms the individuality of the patients in connection
with the state of the outer world in which they have existed from their
birth and out of which the bodily
constitution is developed. The
bodily
constitution is hence the general
cause.”

     Grauvogl made the true
observation that if the organism is not able to adapt itself to varying
conditions there is something wrong with the organism. “If, for
example, a patient with intermittent fever, even before his sickness,
was always affected by damp weather,

he
is not cured, even though the
last paroxysm occurred years ago, so
long as he does not feel quite as well in damp as in dry weather.

     “Or, if a patient
who has been for a long time annoyed by this circumstance that

every
draught of air affects him
unpleasantly, he
is not cured, even if, for
instance, many years have elapsed since he recovered from his last
pneumonia. As long as the disposition to take cold is not removed from
him, every relapse to which he is exposed under such circumstances is
proof of the still
present conditions for the
same or a similar disease, and hence a proof that he
is not wholly cured.

     “Such
constitutional conditions which make themselves known by such
accompanying circumstances, give us, hence, the only right
indications.”

     No further elaboration
is needed in order to show how the mind of von Grauvogl worked to map
out the “general” and to find the basic remedies for the
constitutions out of which arose such a multiplicity of apparently
different diseases but really only different manifestations of one and
the same disease.

     As a sample of that I
may refer to Case IX, p. 32, in which he treated by correspondence a
well-known colleague of his own, and I should like to ask any strict
Hahnemannian if the thinks that even Dr. Kent himself could have found
the simillimum for that plethora of symptoms.

     Before passing on to a
consideration of the three constitutions themselves there are one or two
pregnant passages which it is well to put on record here.

     “

Every
living organism moves within oscillatory rhythm within various spaces of
time from one position of equipoise to another.
We see this in the rhythm of the motions of our solar system eve, and in
its influence excited through the movements of the moon and the earth
upon ourselves. But no oscillatory rhythm of life remains the same ;
it never returns again to the point which it last reached.” (§
200).

     I have put on the title
page a sentence from Paracelsus which might have been used as a text for
the following :

     “To understand a
diseases or a cure is utterly impossible if one does not know the

history
of its development. But where is the historic
knowledge with regard to Pathology and Therapeutics which possesses the
key to these histories of development ? No Clinic speaks thereof.
The lectures of the Professors are silent.” (§ 290).

     “Acute diseases
run their course so to say in the track marked out by the bodily
constitutions.” (§ 291).

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