Veratrum album is useful in constipation characterized by stools that are hard and of large size.
Mental.-It was highly esteemed by Hahnemann for mental diseases, especially for melancholia, religious or sexual, and for mania. With the melancholia, there is a feeling of discouragement, despair about his or her position in society, anxiety, as after committing a crime, or there is much talking about religious matters, praying, cursing, weeping aloud, or there is a mania for kissing everybody (especially before the menses), lewdness and lascivious talk. The maniacal delirium is of a furious kind, with desire to destroy, especially to cut and tear his clothes. These states may come on during the debility following severe illness, after parturition or from suppressed menses. If the characteristics of veratrum album are present it will be a valuable remedy in these cases. Recognized mental diseases exhibiting these symptoms, and for the treatment of which veratrum album should be considered, are acute delirious mania with collapse, acute confessional psychosis, puerperal mania, acute alcoholic confusion, melancholia, dementias praecox (especially with cyanosis and coldness) and adolescent instability.
Sexual.-It is useful for dysmenorrhoea, chronic metritis and endometritis when accompanied by vomiting, purging cold sweat.
Respiratory.-Veratrum album is a remedy for whooping-cough when the attacks are followed by great exhaustion, and the cough is worse on entering a warm room from the open air (bry.), also for spasmodic cough with suffocating fits from constriction of the larynx, and for some cases of chronic bronchitis.
Circulation.-It is very valuable in cardiac debility following acute disease, there is a tendency to faint on moving, sudden pallor on sitting up suddenly, a weak, thready pulse and cold sweat.
An indication for the convulsions for which veratrum album should be prescribed is “violent tonic spasms drawing the feet inwards;” puerperal convulsions may require it.
With the exception of the choleric complaints veratrum album is not specific to any classified disease, but can always be given with great advantage in any case where the leading indications of the drug are present, no matter what its name, and will not infrequently rescue the patient from what appears to be a desperate situation.
Coffee is the best antidote to veratrine poisoning, other antidotes are aconite, camphor and cinchona.
LEADING INDICATIONS.
(1) Extreme prostration; rapid sinking of vital forces; collapse.
(2) Coldness; cold sensations in many parts, as if cold water running through veins. Cold sensation on vertex.
(3) Cold perspirations, especially on the forehead.
(4) Copious discharges; vomit, stools, saliva, sweat.
(5) Easy fainting: from emotions, pain, retching, &c.
(6) People who are habitually cold and deficient in vital reaction.
(7) Skin cold, blue (especially hands and face), perspiring.
(8) Profuse and violent vomiting.
(9) Violent and copious, watery stool.
(10) Green colour of discharges.
(11) Cramps; colic.
(12) Convulsions, with violent tetanic spasms where by the hands feet are “drawn inwards” (?flexed).
(13) Melancholia and mania, especially if religious or sexual.
(14) Children, and lean, choleric or melancholy persons.
(15) Cholera and choleric diarrhoea.
AGGRAVATION:
From least motion (except pains in limbs), heat, wet weather (rheumatism), cold drink (cough and colic) before and during menses.
AMELIORATION:
From moving about (neuralgic and rheumatic pains), uncovering.
Edwin Awdas Neatby founded the Missionary School of Homeopathy and the London Homeopathic Hospital in 1903, and run by the British Homeopathic Association. He died in East Grinstead, Sussex, on the 1st December 1933. Edwin Awdas Neatby wrote The place of operation in the treatment of uterine fibroids, Modern developments in medicine, Pleural effusions in children, Manual of Homoeo Therapeutics,