Social change

While training as a homeopath, I wrote a dissertation ('Do the Miasms Have Their Origin in Social Changes?') investigating the links between social change and illness, and found a clear correlation between social inequality and chronic illness. Written some years before The Spirit Level, this ground-breaking article links the homeopathic theory of miasms to historical evidence of disease and social change. It also identifies the crucial role of oppression in increasing the effects of disease during the period of colonisation.

 

 A revised version was subsequently published in the journal Homeopathic Links, under the title 'Miasms and Social Change?'. The article can be downloaded by clicking on the image.

 

Note on the word "miasm"

Historically, the term "miasma" was used for "bad air" which was thought to make people ill. Samuel Hahnemann (discoverer of the principles of homeopathy at the end of the eighteenth century) realised that it was not air but minute organisms which made people ill:

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On board ships – in those confined spaces, filled with mouldy watery vapours, the cholera-miasm finds a favourable element for its multiplication, and grows into an enormously increased brood of those excessively minute, invisible, living creatures, so inimical to human life, of which the contagious matter of the cholera most probably consists – on board these ships, I say, this concentrated aggravated miasm kills several of the crew ... [1]

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As a result he used the term to refer to what orthodox medicine later called "germs", making him one of the earliest adopters of the germ theory of disease. When "germs" became the dominant term, homeopaths used the word "miasm" to refer not to the infective agent, but to the patterns of chronic illness which they had observed as resulting from the suppression of acute infectious illnesses.

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1. Samuel Hahnemann, Appeal to Thinking Philanthropists Respecting the Mode of Propagation of the Asiatic Cholera, (Leipzig: the author, 1831), translated by R E Dudgeon, M.D. in The Lesser Writings of Samuel Hahnemann, 1851 edition (New Delhi: B Jain Publishers, repr. edn 2002), p. 758.

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