ON May 20th, 1940, I was visited by a Miss M.B., an unmarried woman of 42 years, who lived with her parents doing heavy housework. She came to me in a desperate condition. She had been afflicted with tuberculosis in a very active form for many years, and she had spent considerable spells in sanatoriums during the three years 1916, 1920 and 1923. When she went first to a sanatorium she was 18 years old. She had always been in poor health and had had tubercular peritonitis.
Miss M.B. had had pneumonia twice as a child and measles badly. She was very constipated, was in a disastrous condition and had been in a bad condition all her life. She had seen a doctor shortly before she came to consult me and he had told her that the only thing she could do was to go for a fourth time to a sanatorium she would be dead in six months. She has seen one or two of my books and articles in which I had described cures of bad cases of tuberculosis and she resolved to put herself under my care.
The poor woman was terribly jaundiced with a brownish tinge, her eyes had no sparkle and her hair had no lustre, her lips and mucous membranes were very anaemic and she looked the picture of misery and depression. I tried to cheer her up as well as I could and she left me with some hope.
In sending her my directions I told her:.
“You are 42 years old, have extremely heavy housework to do in your parents home, carrying heavy buckets of a coal up many stairs. Your father, a tailor, is 66, and troubled with angina, and your mother is 65 and and well. Your parents have four girls.
You are the eldest, and in your family the first-born very frequently has tuberculosis. You have tuberculosis and were in sanatorium in 1916, 1920 and 1923, and the doctor wanted to send you again recently but you refused. You had pneumonia twice as a child and had tubercular peritonitis.
“You are pleasant to look upon, far too thin and your chest has extremely poor expansion, and you must practise deep breathing night and morning. You lost all your teeth many years ago; they were black and unsightly. You have the scar of an abscess on the right side, which kept discharging pus for a year and a half, you have weak ankles.
You have much cough at three in the morning with nausea or vomiting. You have had whooping-cough badly, are apt to get heavy night sweats, are irritable, tidy, restless, love sweets, but have practically no appetite.
“You live on next to nothing and take for breakfast merely four or five cups of tea and nothing to eat. I want you to take solid meals and take the liquid afterwards. It is impossible to keep your health on the present diet. You have distinct prolapse of the abdomen which can be corrected either by wearing a Curtis belt, made by Curtis & Co., of 7 Mandeville Place, London, W., to whom you can write for an illustrated catalogue, or you can try lying in bed with the seat well raised on a hard mattress or pillow.
As a result of under-nutrition you are very anaemic, ankles turn. Your tonsils and adenoids were taken out when you were ten. As neat eggs upset you you must take them only embodied in food. You must abstain from taking boiling liquids which are dangerous. You have a very red tongue and feel worse in damp weather”.
The most important thing was to improve Miss M.B.s digestion. I gave her a combination of Nux vomica and Carbo. veg. 3x, to be taken before meals in alternation with Hydrastis, mother tincture tablets. They act particularly on the liver, which was in a very poor condition. Because of her tuberculosis she was to take Arsenicum iodatum 3x first and last thing, and a combination of Ferrum 2x and Arsenicum 3x as a tonic after meals. She had a bad cough which was accompanied by nausea for which I gave her Drosera 3x to be taken as needed.
The unhealing abscess in the right side called for Pyrogen in the 200th potency, a dose to be taken last thing Monday night. I also gave her Lueticum 200, marked “poor sleep”, a dose to be taken last thing Thursday night, and Morbillinum 200 as an antidote to measles, to be taken last thing Saturday night. She was to report to me once a week.
Her first report sent on May 28th was not satisfactory. She has been losing a great deal of weight before she came to me and during the first week under my care she had lost 14 lbs., but she reported, “My appetite is improving and I have had no heartburn or night sweats!” The most interesting fact was her reaction to the once a week medicines. She wrote:.
“On Sunday, after taking Morbillinum 200 on Saturday night, I came out in a dreadful measles rash, all over my body, the face not so bad, but was covered elsewhere, still have a little rash under the skin. After taking Pyrogen 200, the place in my right side is throbbing like a gathering; I think I told you that just below the scar of the abscess last year there came a lump, as though another one was forming. This is the place which is now throbbing. This lump went away.
James Ellis Barker wrote a very large number of books, both under the name James Ellis Barker and under his real German name Otto Julius Eltzbacher, The Truth about Homœopathy; Rough Notes on Remedies with William Murray; Chronic Constipation; The Story of My Eyes; Miracles Of Healing and How They are Done; Good Health and Happiness; New Lives for Old: How to Cure the Incurable; My Testament of Healing; Cancer, the Surgeon and the Researcher; Cancer, how it is Caused, how it Can be Prevented with a foreward by William Arbuthnot Lane; Cancer and the Black Man etc.