. . . . continued from last issue
We have acknowledged in the previous article that it is the interaction between host and virus that leads to disease. To elaborate on this concept, we can say the miasms, particularly sycosis, are fundamental to the interaction between host and virus. The acceptance of the theory of the chronic miasms requires a shifting of perspective regarding infection. Rather than viewing the symptoms of illness as the result of invasion by microorganisms, it needs to be considered that internal disorder creates the appropriate soil for replication of endogenous retroviral agents and other so-called infectious agents.
Though viruses have been the object of a tremendous amount of research, there still is no specific treatment for the multitude of viral diseases that plague humanity, and the question of the origin of viruses continues to be debated. There were those who maintained that viruses descended from microorganisms that had gradually become more dependent on their hosts; others were of the opinion that viruses were originally components of cellular organelles that had evolved toward greater independence from the cell. Based on the hypothesis that it is the miasms that are ultimately responsible for control of genetic expression and thus are the factors that set in motion retroviral replication, the idea of spontaneous generation, which was shunned by science years ago, needs to be reconsidered.
In the late nineteenth century an area of scientific concern was the controversy over the spontaneous generation of microorganisms, a question dating back to classical times. The belief that microorganisms were generated only by microorganisms had to be established before the germ theory and the related doctrine of specificity of infection could be accepted. However, if microorganisms arose spontaneously, they could possibly be by-products of the disease, rather than the causes of the diseases with which they were associated. It was the proponents of spontaneous generation who provided the main opposition to the germ theory. In the late 1850s and 1860s, Pasteur demonstrated that microorganisms did not appear in sterile media and therefore did not arise spontaneously under normal lab conditions. Therefore, the theory of spontaneous generation was discarded as being non-scientific.
The idea of spontaneous generation has been repeatedly alluded to in homeopathic literature by several of the great homeopaths of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, although little notice is given to it by homeopaths of today.
I will quote a few. Kent: “Changes in the blood, when health is disturbed, prepare the blood for the spontaneous development of various forms to correspond to every change in bodily disorders. There is spontaneous development of sepsis in the blood. Sepsis comes first, then, the germs appear.” Banerjee: “In phthisis . . . the degenerative condition of the lung and the bacilli are only the effect and expression of the disease. The bacilli appear when the lung has degenerated to a certain degree. . . . The cause of phthisis is subtler than that, and you can see it only with the eye of reason.”
. . . . to be continued
Dr. Barbara Bova, HOD, Dept. of Homeopathy