With the violent delirium of Belladonna there will be its heat, its redness, its burning. Brain burns: head burns: skin burns.
Bryonia, as we saw the other day, has the busy delirium of everyday, common things: the anxiety about business: the desire to get on with it.
Belladonna has the furious delirium that leaps at the bare wall: that tries to escape: that bites-spits-tears. Fears also, of an imaginary black dog-of the gallows, etc.
Kent says that Belladonna is not indicated in continuous fevers, such as typhoid. Here it will do actual harm. But here Hyoscyamus will come in. And Nash says that Hyoscyamus is the best remedy he knows for typhoid fever, or typhoid pneumonia, with delirium that lapses into stupor, carphology, silence or muttering.
Belladonna, Stramonium and Hyoscyamus are botanically related: and they are all “high-grade delirium drugs” in the order given, Belladonna being the most violent. They have much in common, yet much that distinguishes.
Belladonna and Stramonium have both redness of the face, but Stramonium lacks the intense, burning heat. The face of Hyoscyamus is pale and sunken. Belladonna cannot bear light: Stramonium cannot bear the dark, is terrified of the dark: must have light. Stramonium wants to pray: Hyoscyamus in its delirium or mania has lost all sense of decency and wants to uncover and so on. These are Nash’s “trio of delirium remedies”. But of course it does not need delirium, or mania, or convulsions to call for one of these remedies in sickness. These are their extremes of action.
Hahnemann says that a study of the symptoms of Belladonna shows that it corresponds in similarity to a number of commonly met with morbid states, and is therefore frequently applicable for curative purposes. That the small-souled persons who cry out against its poisonous character, and let their patients die for want of Belladonna, because they “have mild remedies for these diseases” only betray their ignorance, “for no medicine can be a substitute for another.”
And he teaches that the most violent poisons will become the mildest of remedies, “provided that they are given in appropriate smallest doses.” He says, by a hundred-fold experience at the sick bed during the last eight or ten years, he could not help descending to the decillion-fold dilution (the 30th potency). Besides its prophylactic powers in scarlet fever, he finds it the best preventive of hydrophobia, given at first every third or fourth day, and then at longer intervals. And indeed Belladonna has many of the symptoms of hydrophobia: the fear of water, the attempts to bite: the spasm of the throat that prevents swallowing, the mania, the delirium, in which he is “in terror of dogs”- “surrounded by dogs”, and so on.
ALLEN in his Encyclopedia, gives 2,545 symptoms, as caused by Belladonna. Of these the black-type symptoms, the much-caused and much-cured by Belladonna, are so numerous that we will only attempt to give some of them: they go to show the genius of the drug and its spheres of most-marked action.
Inclination to bite those around them.
She attempted to bite and strike her attendants, broke into fits of laughter, gnashed her teeth. The head was hot, the face red, the look wild and fierce.
Inclination to bite those around him, and to tear everything about him to pieces.
Raging, violent fury. Furious delirium. She pulled at the hair of the bystanders.
Such fury (with burning heat of the body, and open, staring, immovable eyes) that she had to be held constantly, lest she should attack someone: and when thus held, so that she could not move, she spat continually at those about her.
The face was red, the head hot, the look wild and staring: pupils dilated: the arteries of the neck and head visibly pulsating.
In the evening he was seized with such violent delirium that it required three men to confine him. His face was livid; his eyes injected and protruding; the pupils strongly dilated; the carotid arteries pulsating most violently; a full hard frequent pulse, with loss of power to swallow.
Great intolerance of light and noise.
He sought continually to spring out of bed. When put to bed he sprang out again in delirium, talked constantly, laughed out, and exhibited complete loss of consciousness, did not know his own parents.
Rush of blood to the head: pulsation of cerebral arteries, and a throbbing in the interior of the head. Very intense headache.
The pains in the head are aggravated by noise, motion, when moving the eyes, by shocks, by contact.
Afraid to cough on account of the increase of pain it causes.
Pressive headache, especially in forehead.
Painful pressure in head, especially lower part of forehead directly above the nose, intolerable on stepping or treading.
Three violent stabs, forehead to occiput, whereupon all previous headache suddenly disappears.
Violent throbbing in brain from behind forwards and towards both sides: throbbing ends on the surface in painful shootings.
Jerking headache, violent on walking quickly or going rapidly upstairs at every step it seemed as if the brain rose and fell in the forehead; the pain ameliorated by pressing strongly on the forehead. (The only “better for pressure” of Belladonna?)
Stabbing as if with a knife from temple to temple.
The head is so sensitive that the least contact gives her pain.
Eyes projecting and sparkling: pupils dilated.
A staring look. Distorted, with redness and swelling of face.
Eyes dry: motion attended with sense of dryness and stiffness.
Burning heat in eyes.
Dilated pupils: dilated and immovable.
Everything he sees looks red.
Great sensitiveness of smell.
Great redness of the face; glowing red face, with inexpressible pains in the head. Face, neck and chest much swollen.
Tumefaction and redness of face and lips.
Spasmodic action of the muscles of the face.
Convulsive movements of face, with distortion of mouth.
The tongue and palate dark-red. Dryness of throat and difficult swallowing.
Dryness of tongue and throat, so great so to interfere with speech. Dryness of fauces most distressing.
During deglutition, feeling in throat as if it were too narrow, as if nothing would pass properly.
Scraping raw sensation of epiglottis: raw and sore.
Nausea.
Long-lasting painfulness of the whole abdomen, as if it were all raw and sore.
Excessive tenderness of abdomen, which cannot bear the slightest touch.
Violent cutting pressure in hypogastrium, now here, now there.
Retention of urine, which only passes drop by drop.
Badly smelling haemorrhage from the uterus.
Violent pressing and urging towards the sexual organs as if everything would fall out there.
Menses too soon and very profuse, of thick, decomposed, dark-red blood.
Catarrh or cough with coryza.
Painful dryness in larynx.
Larynx as if inflamed and swollen.
Hoarseness.
Hollow, hoarse cough.
Pulse full and quick.
(Then numbers of black-type symptoms of extremities.)
Thighs and legs, as if bruised all over, as if rotten.
Shootings and gnawings along the shafts of bones tearing in joints.
Epileptic convulsions.
Every moment wished to get out of bed.
The boy wished to escape.
Great irritability and impressiveness of the senses.
Tastes and smells everything more acutely.
Taste, sight and hearing keener; mind more easily moved and thoughts more active.
Excessive nervous excitability with exalted sensibility of all the organs. The least noise-light-annoying.
Redness of the whole body with quick pulse.
Redness like scarlatina of the entire surface of the body.
Pustules break out on cheeks and nose.
He starts as if in fright and awakes, when just falling asleep.
Starts as if in a fright, feeling as if she were falling down deep (Thuja), which caused her to shudder violently.
Very restless sleep.
At night the boys became restless, spoke irrationally, and could with difficulty be kept in bed.
The child tosses about, kicks and quarrels in its sleep.
Temperature of the head very much increased.
The skin hot, dry, scarlet, especially intense on face and ears.
Burning heat within and without.
Whatever the ailment, headache, fever, inflammation, where there is burning heat, redness, pain that will not bear pressure, jar, or motion, think of Belladonna.
But, after all this, who would dream that Belladonna was one of the most commonly useful of nursery remedies? yet it is.
As FARRINGTON puts it, “The character of the (Belladonna) disease is acute, sudden and violent. The very rapidity of the onset should at once suggest Belladonna.” [Or Aconite, he might have added: but their symptoms are very different, as we have seen.] “For example,” he says, “a child is perfectly well on going to bed. A few hours afterwards it is aroused with violent symptoms, jerking of the limbs, irritation of the brain, and screaming out during sleep. All these symptoms suggest Belladonna.” [But to complete the picture, he might have added, that in these cases the face is red, the head hot, the pupils big.]
One consults and quotes from several of our prescribing geniuses, because one man has more completely grasped the inwardness, and has had more experience with one remedy, another with another remedy. For the same reason it is well to read and study the same drug in several books, to get enlightenment always from the man best qualified to enlighten. Pick plenty of brains if you want to nourish and stimulate your own.
