He says, I cured a very bad case of years’ standing. The patient would cry out and grasp head with both hands at every cough. It finally became so bad that he had to lie in bed, because the hurt was so much worse when sitting. Capsicum cured very quickly.
GUERNSEY. It affects mucous tissues in very prominent degree.
Head, aches as if it would burst: beats: throbs; darts. Better in motion. Biting, burning, stinging itch, scalp, as if it had been rubbed with cayenne pepper.
Abdomen as if it would burst. Yawning by day, and sleeplessness by night. Sensation as if falling from a height during sleep (this occurs especially with Thuja.) Eructations of red pepper feel and taste: sensation of cold water in stomach. Symptoms generally left sided; for light-haired people: tendency to get fat: lax muscles: bloated skin.
FARRINGTON speaks of the marked irritating properties of Capsicum: it takes but little of the drug to produce irritation. He says it is eliminated through the kidneys, producing strangury with burning when passing water. He says it acts best on stoutish persons of lax fibre. Weak stomach, weak digestion, whole man weak. Adults and children alike are irritable and get angry: are worse from the least draught, even of warm air: clumsy.
He is thirsty, yet drinking causes shivering. An unusual symptom: very offensive breath during cough. In diphtheria, carrion odour from the mouth.
Throat feels spasmodically closed: worse when not swallowing.
Now for some extracts from KENT. He says:
Most of the substances that are used on the table as seasonings in foods will in the course of a generation or two be very useful medicines, because parents poison themselves with these substances, tea, coffee, pepper, and tobacco (though tobacco cannot be said to be on the table, yet it might as well be if it is used at all), and these poisonous effects in the parents cause in the children a predisposition to diseases, which are similar to the disease produced by these substances.
In the fat, flabby, red-faced children of beer drinkers and pepper eaters, with poor reaction, a relaxed and flabby constitution, red face and varicose condition, those that have been over-stimulated, children of over-stimulated men, we find the sphere for Capsicum very often. The face looks rosy, but is cold and not warm, and is seen to be studded with a fine system of capillaries. Plump, round, with no endurance, a false plethora, like Calcarea End of nose red, cheeks red, redness over cheekbones, red eyes. These constitutions react slowly after diseases, do not respond to remedies, are sluggish, tired, lazy. Schoolgirls who cannot study, and get home-sick. Gouty joints, stiff, clumsy, weak. Chilly in the open air: worse for bathing.
Mental state: home-sickness. oversensitive: suspicious: always looking out for an insult. Obstinate in the extreme: it is devilishness. If she wants a thing will oppose it, if suggested by someone else.
Tormented by persistent thoughts of suicide.
Headache: as if skull would split when moving head. Feeling as if skull would fly to pieces: holds head with hand. Head feels too large. As if brain would be pressed out and eyes pressed out on stooping.
Capsicum has a peculiar action on the bones of the external ear and the mastoid process. *A girl has been seen at Hospital with a constant temperature of about 100* since a mastoid operation some years ago. A dose of Capsicum given after working of this Drug Picture has resulted in a normal temperature ever since, i.e. three months. Abscesses round about and below the ear, and caries: petrous portion of the temporal bone necrosed. It has been a frequently indicated remedy in mastoid abscess which worries the old school doctors so much that they bore down and remove the cells for fear of basilar inflammation: a devilish practice, for, after they do all this and nearly kill the patient, and the spasms, and the ear disease.
Old catarrhs. when no reaction seems to come after the most carefully chosen remedies, and all at once the doctor wakens up to the realization that the patient has a red face, and it is cold, and the end of the nose is red and cold, and the patient is fat and flabby and has not much endurance; never could learn at school: and if she exerts breaks out into a sweat and freezes in the cold air. When he gives Capsicum to that patient it rouses he it may not cure, but after it Silica or Kali bich or other remedy which was perhaps given before and did not act, takes hold and cures.
The parts you touch are loose and flabby, red, fat, and cold.
Dysentery. After stool tenesmus and thirst, and drinking causes shuddering. Haemorrhoids sting and pinch, as if pepper had been sprinkled on them with plethora: plump, flabby; sensitive to cold, red face. Chronic hoarseness: and he is rotund, chilly, red-faced and the hoarseness disappears under Capsicum.
Cough in sudden paroxysms, convulsing the whole body; every cough jars the affected parts. Stitches in the suffering part with the cough.
