Tuberculinum, Part 1

More Than A Homeopathic Remedy Profile: The History, Miasm, and Nosode

I knew very little about Tuberculinum when a homeopath prescribed it for me in 2017. She gave me a single 1M¹ dose after which I understood the possibility of exceptional aggravations and extraordinary healing.

I also understood that the essence of a nosode² is greater than the nature of the microorganism or tissue it’s prepared from; a nosode like Tuberculinum reflects the entire individual and collective experience of those who live(d) with, die(d) from, and were impacted by Tuberculosis.

The Essence

When I write one of these profiles I like to start with a few sentences that summarize the essence of the remedy, but I quickly realized I couldn’t constrain Tuberculinum’s essence to a single paragraph. At first I chalked it up to the remedy’s enmeshment with the multi-faceted Tubercular miasm³. But as I continued to study the history of Tuberculosis, the miasm, and the remedy, I knew it just needed more space to be fully understood. This is the nature of Tuberculinum. It resists and rails against confinement.

Homeopaths will say that the essence of Tuberculinum is the experience of feeling trapped, stuck, suffocated, or oppressed. That this felt sense informs Tuberculinum’s tendency toward hectic activity and restlessness; its desire for change, travel, and freedom; its unwillingness to tolerate boredom and monotony. These things are true. But this distillation ignores the depth and breadth of the remedy; it leads us, ironically, to prescribe it narrowly, when it could benefit those whose main complaints don’t, on the surface, fit the suffocative stereotype of Tuberculinum…myself included.

Let’s get to know this remedy’s expansiveness first by examining the history of Tuberculosis.

Photo by Aakash Dhage on Unsplash

The History (as it Relates to the remedy)

Tuberculosis (TB), also known as consumption or phthisis (from the Greek phthiein, meaning to waste or decay) is characterized by a persistent cough, bloody sputum, night sweats, fatigue, fever, chills, and wasting or weight loss. It is, according to statistics, the world’s deadliest, albeit, curable infection.

If you don’t hear about TB these days, it’s not because it’s gone away. According the World Health Organization, 1.25 million people died from the disease in 2023 with over 80% of those deaths in low and middle-income regions, namely Southeast Asia and Africa. John Green asserts in his 2025 book Everything is Tuberculosis that the phthisis of today “is both a form and expression of injustice,” thriving “wherever power systems devalue human lives.” In essence, it’s become a disease of the impoverished; those with drug-resistant TB who cannot afford the costly medicines suffer the most.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, however, phthisis exploded alongside industrialization in Europe and North America. It was in the cities’ crowded factories, markets, and tenements that TB proliferated. Consumptives, as they were called, eventually sought air and inspiration in the dry climate of the west. Clean, open air and sunshine were, in fact, prescribed by doctors. As sanatoriums became the norm for languishing TB patients, so did boredom, as they were also instructed to do very little lest they worsen their condition. Green notes how controlling these environments were; children isolated from their parents were punished for their restlessness and expressiveness and forced to stay quietly in bed. These climate and sanitarium “cures” ultimately failed the collective and contributed to the sense of being trapped and oppressed as well as the desire for escape, travel, movement, excitement, and freedom that we see in the Tubercular miasm, the nosode, and the person who needs it today.

Despite TB’s high mortality rate at the time, Europeans and Americans romanticized the disease. It had come to be associated with a certain personality or spirit, specifically those melancholic creatives, “especially attuned to the fragile and fleeting loveliness of life.”⁴ Prominent authors, poets, artists, and musicians like Keats, the Brontë sisters, Chekhov, Chopin, Munch, and Kafka all succumbed to the disease reinforcing this romanticization.

Even later, in 1916, Maurice Fishberg wrote in his book Pulmonary Tuberculosis,⁵ young TB patients “display enormous intellectual capacity of the creative kind. They [those of artistic temperament] are in a constant state of nervous irritability, but despite the fact that it hurts their physical condition, they keep on working and produce their best works.” This spes phthisical, or consumptive spirit, was purportedly born from the wasting itself, their soulful creations arising only as a consequence of their imminent death. Not coincidentally we see related characteristics in the miasm, the nosode, and the folks who need it: A propensity for art and philosophy, often arising from despair and dissatisfaction; the desire to find meaning, which drives them restlessly to all corners of the earth; and ailments from their endless mental exertion.