This book review is reprinted with the permission from the Autumn 2009 Edition of The Homeopath.
The Society of Homeopaths
www.homeopathy-soh.org
Miasms and Nosodes, Origins of Disease Volume 1
By Louis Klein
Narayana Publishers, Kandern, 2009, hardback, 526 pgs
ISBN 9783939931683
Reviewed by Francis Treuherz
I began a review of Louis Klein's Clinical Focus Guide (2003) that he 'has written and published what I am sure will become a modern classic'. This applies again; our descendants will be studying this great book one hundred years from now.
He devotes 50 pages to the history and philosophy of miasms and nosodes, immediately clarifying obscure concepts. The rest of the book is intensely practical. Louis Klein discusses a range of miasms and nosodal families. Each remedy picture follows a pattern, the various synonyms, a description, the scientific and other names and meanings, a lengthy commentary where we learn what Klein knows from his vast and deep experience of prescribing these remedies, and source notes - the conventional disease knowledge. There follow a Clinical Focus Guide - an account of the symptoms in the usual schema order, and then selections from traditional homeopathic sources, and relationships of remedies if any. The strongest parts, and there are many of these, are his descriptions of the disposition of the remedy and the patient, with subtle and useful detail. There are full bibliographies and an index.
I cannot list all the technical names for the families of miasms and nosodes so will mention just a few: clostridiales - Botulinum, and Tewnus; the plague Yersinia; parasites - Malaria and Toxoplasmosis; tuberculosis and leprosy - Leprominium and Johneinum. This last remedy is Crohn's disease in cattle transformed into a nosode for us, through a full proving detailed in the book. This is a real breakthrough for homeopathy.
There is the remarkable synchronicity which can occur in homeopathy: Johneinum dreams of toilets as you might have expected, but there are also strong feelings of persecution, in a disease which is prevalent in (but not confined to) populations of Ashkenazi Jews - and the prover who experienced this was not Jewish. Toxoplasmosis dreams of cats; the picture in humans often follows proximity to cats. Yersinia patients are seen as a pest.
The book brings to life and sorts out what has become the mythology of our well-known remedies, repeated from one author to the next, like Pertussin and the Tuberculinum nosodes, so that we can study them afresh. With each remedy, old and new, there is detail, subtle detail, but organised in such a way as to be clear, memorable, and easily found again.
The remedies described in this book are those that the author has prescribed, not just studied in earlier material medica, and reproduced for us; that is the strength of this book. I have read it 3 times and will have to be restrained from taking it on holiday. I look forward to Volume 2.