What ineffable twaddle!
Dysmenorrhoea, or Painful, Menstruation.
Pain at the period is so very common that not a few regard the pain as a part of the bargain. Such is, however not the case by any means. I am prepared to grant that a little discomfort and malaise may be normal to the time of the period but only very slightly so; if it ever comes to pain, there is something wrong.
I hold that every woman who suffers from dysmenorrhoea is, so far, abnormal and ailing in some particular; it may not be much, but pain at the period is not normal.
Menorrhagia
The precise amount of the period to be within the limits of normality is not easy to determine, depending as it does on family, race, mode of life, and other things; still we can in a given case fairly easily determine where enough leaves off and the too much begins.
Just a pain at the period proclaims that something is wrong, so does an excess of the flow, in an even louder tone. I have noticed many, many times that whenever a woman has persistently suffered from excessive menstruation, the change of life rarely fails to disclose the cause; for, as the flow diminishes, so in equal pace, do some other constitutional ailings crop up. A very common thing is rheumatoid arthritis, expressed as swelling of the bones of the fingers.
Amenorrhoea
When the menorrhoea ceases we call it amenorrhoea. That this state is wrong needs no demonstration, and of course the same may be said of insufficient menstruation.
It lies without the scope of this little work to dwell upon menstruation other than in this short manner. We are here concerned more with its final cessation, and thus only glance at it in outline to get a clear notion of where we are in considering the Ills and Ailings incident to the Change of Life.
We may as well begin with, perhaps, the most common of all post- menopausal troubles, viz., The Flushes.
Heats and Flushes
One of the most common complaints of women after the menopause is Heats and Flushes, and the phenomena are very curious and not easily understood. Personally I have never been able to satisfy my mind whether they are morbid or normal; but all things considered, I incline to the view than they are not normal.
When I first read that Lachesis controlled these flushes, I was very much astonished, and took an early opportunity of putting the statement to the test of clinical experiment, and found it quite true. Forthwith I jumped to the conclusion that Lachesis cured this flushes; but after a time I found that though they are to a large extent controlled by it, they are not really curable thereby. The flushes persist in recurring.
The same may be said of Glonine, but of this I have but small experience. Dr. Richard Hughes speaks very highly of it. The similitude offered by the provings of Urtica urens to the flushes led me to use it in lieu of or after Lachesis, with the same results, viz., – prompt but passing amelioration. And there the matter rests with me. A genuine cure of the flushes as a morbid entity I do not know. We must fall back on the repertory, and find the similimum for each individual case an awful labour, deny it who may. That something which lies behind the symptoms of the flushes is to me an unknown quantity.
Leucorrhoea in Relation to the Menopause
Ordinary leucorrhoea ceases with the period to which it very commonly stands in relationship. Where the whites persist after the change of life, we must regard it as the expression of a morbid constitutional state, and very often of positive womb disease. And as Leucorrhoea usually ceases with the period, the organism is also thereby robbed of a constitutional outlet for many morbid products. This may not be orthodox doctrine in the schools, but it is certainly the doctrine of nature, as any clear unbiased observer may see for himself. The practice of using injections for the whites is utterly bad, a downright sin against nature’s ways.
Years ago I was called upon to treat a young wife for a small tumour of the breast (interstitial mastitis) that much puzzled me; patient was accustomed to use injections for the whites, and do this I attributed the lump in the breast. My view of the case was so distasteful to the lady and to her husband that I was dismissed as an incompetent adviser. The sequel proved, however, that I was right, and after the lady’s death, the grief-stricken husband came round to my view –too late.
For twenty years I have noting the ill- effects due to the suppression of the whites by injections, and I could fill a book with proofs thereof. I take every opportunity of denouncing the practice as altogether damnable. If you cannot cure the cause of the whites, for heaven’s sake let the thing alone- at least do no harm. But patients will have them, colleagues tell me. Will they? They never have them from me, and the thing, duly explained to the sufferers, usually offers no difficulties. Moreover, leucorrhoea can be readily cured by homoeopathic remedies, and injections are therefore needless.
The talk about personal cleanliness and comfort is mere moonshine: all mucous membranes are self-cleansing, and the use of injections, far from being sweet and clean, is in fact a dirty proceeding. Why, the epithelial cells are being constantly cast off with all the impurities clinging to them, and extruded from the body, and exquisitely clean brand new cells are left behind – the tubings of the human body are living tissue, not drainpipes.
Who cleans the lining membrane of the faeces carrying gut? It is self- cleansing, and so is the lining membrane of the civilized world tell their lady patients to use vaginal injections for purposes of cleanliness: the error of this teaching is stupendous, and fraught with untold evil consequences, and nasty and vulgar to boot. Am I conscious of the terrible opposition my thus expressed view of the perniciousness of the practice of using vaginal injections will call forth?
I am, and defy it all. The practice of using vaginal injections is damnable, and I damn it accordingly. Leucorrhoea is not in itself and the disease, but the cause of the leucorrhoea is the disease. And not only so, but the leucorrhoea is of many different natures and qualities, just the same as is haemorrhage: in fact, what is leucorrhoea but haemorrhage without the red blood corpuscles? At this point it seems almost imperative to prove that leucorrhoea is a constitutional ailing that may not be suppressed; but its full consideration here would lead me too far away from ” the Change of Life,” when the whites is a thing of the past.
Nature’s Days of Wrath and Vengeance
So long as the menses offer an outlet for disease products and disease germs, so long is the organism of the woman kept free for the time being;but neither primary nor what I would term “echoic” disease are thereby cured, and we may very aptly compare the state to that of baling- out a leaky ship; if the baling out process be adequate the navigation of the leaky ship is not greatly interfered with, but if the baling -out is less than the leakage the water accumulates and in time sinks the ship.
Precisely so is it with the diseases of menstruating women: during the period of active menstruation the bailing -out of disease elements by the female organism is commonly adequate, and the woman lives on fairly well; she is indeed a leaky vessel constitutionally, but the leakage of the month is baled out, so to speak, with every menstruation. And just as with the leaky vessel, the time of the ultimate sinking comes on by degrees, not all at once; so, as the menopause begins to cast its shadows before it, we see symptoms in our patients of defective depuration in the from of “spasms,” dyspepsia, rheumatoid arthritis, uterine trouble, tumours, eczema, asthma, cancer.
Let any physician listen attentively and sympathetically to the health-histories of a few scores of ladies in their sufferings at the change of life, and carefully note all their historic points, and he will find that the troubles at the change of life are not of the same, but far anterior to it: the ills and ailings incident to the change of life in women date from, often, far back in their lives, or in the lives of their parents, and are, as it were, the stems, branches, leaves, flowers, and fruits of the long-gone-before.
This in a general way, I will come to the concrete anon; here I merely desire to state in general terms the ground -thought that many of the ailments at and after the menopause seem to me to be, so to speak, nature’s wreakings of wrathful vengeance for persistent disobedience during the previous course of the life, and by Nature I mean the laws of nature in accordance with which we do not reap oats when we sowed barley. What evidence of this can I bring?
Let me go to some of the first of the cases that have passed under my own observation, and which I took down from time to time.
Addison’s Disease from Suppressed Leucorrhoea
In the month of July, 1982, a New York merchant brought his wife to London to place her under my care for vomiting, great debility, weakness, and a brown discoloration of the skin. Patient was forty-one years of age, and was still regular, but had had no children. That Addison’s disease is a branch of the tree known as tuberculosis seems very possible; but although this patient was in a state of debility in her youth which bordered, they said, on consumption, and her own father had succumbed to phthisis, still the most striking symptom was a fearful backache that resisted all treatment, and in the main my remedies did patient but very little good.
Burnett was one of the first to speak about vaccination triggering illness. This was discussed in his book, Vaccinosis, published in 1884. He introduced the remedy Bacillinum. He authored twenty books, including the much loved "Fifty Reason for Being a Homeopath." He was the editor of The Homoeopathic World.