Introduction
HERE we have one of Dr. James Compton Burnett’s very special remedies. He was a genius of the first order where the treatment of the sick was concerned, and also in the writing of his telling little monographs. We owe much to his intuition, his enterprise, and his indefatigable industry. He had a very large practice on his London days, as well as in Brighton-his home. We are told that, in Town, he would be literally besieged in the early hours of the morning: and that, when he was discovered lying dead in his hotel room, it was a terrible blow to the many he had helped and cured of difficult and, apparently, hopeless conditions.
In Hale’s New Remedies, where Ceanothus appears as Ceanothus virginiana, there is, in the 1880 edition, a lengthy quotation of five long, closely printed pages from a Homoeopathic Journal of the previous year from Dr.Burnett’s pen. Hale says, “It remained for an English physician, Dr. J.C. Burnett, to discover the affinity of Ceanothus for splenic disorders.” And in Dr.Burnett’s booklet, Diseases of the Spleen and their Remedies (1900), Ceanothus figures largely, with a number of detailed cases, not only of enlarged spleen, but also of pain deep in the left hypochondrium; some of which cases had even been diagnosed as heart disease, but which cured rapidly and completely under Ceanothus. The whole is a record of the triumphs of a physician who knew just a little more than his fellows, and who joyfully applied his knowledge for the relief of suffering and the removal of grave disabilities.
Burnett always gave honour where honour was due: to the washerwoman who added to his knowledge by curing one of his malaria patients with stinging nettle tea. From time to time “Organotherapy” or “Organopathy” was of great help to him, in regard to which he writes, “The real father of organopathy, in essence and substance, is Hohenheim, an eminent and learned physician called Paracelsus, for proof of which see his works, and hereafter in this little volume on Diseases of the Spleen, if space permits.” Burnett contends that organotherapy is included in the wider generalization known as Homoeopathy; for whereas organopathy claims only that certain drugs affect certain parts curatively, preferentially, or specifically, as for instance, digitalis the heart, Homoeopathy claims that not only does digitalis affect the heart but to be curative the natural disease of the organ must be like in expression to the therapeutic organopathy, or drug action. Homoeopathy, he adds, “may be said to be based upon organopathy, for a drug to cure the heart of its disease specifically must necessarily affect the heart in the same manner.”
Burnett says that previous to reading a short account of Ceanothus in an early edition of Hale, he had frequently felt a difficulty in treating a pain in the left side, having its seat, apparently, in the spleen. “Myrtus communis has a pain in the left side, but that is high up under the clavicle; the pain that is a little lower is the property of Sumbul; still lower of Acidum fluoricum, a little farther to the left of Acidum oxalicum; more to the right of Aurum; right under the left breast of Cimicifuga rac. These remedies promptly do their work when left sided pains are a part of the disease picture, but they will not touch the pain that is deep in behind the ribs of the left side. The real splenic stitch requires China, Chelidonium, Berberis, Chininum sulph. or Conium, or Ceanothus Americanus.”
In low potencies, in which Burnett used it, he found, “It frequently relaxes the bowels, and I have known this even amount to diarrhoea.”
One patient had been taking it for about a fortnight, when one day she felt a great nervous excitement. This passed when she left the medicine off: then recurred;when it was resumed, to again cease when it was discontinued. Her bowels were relaxed, and her menses were two days too early and very profuse; a thing that had never happened to her before.
We will give a few of Burnett’s gleanings and deductions, in regard to Ceanothus, quoted from his little Spleen book.
“Death,” he says, ‘is often, at the start, in a particular organ, i.e. local, and if the part be saved in time life may be preserved. In the acute processes the value of a particular organ strikes one often very forcibly, there may be no need of any constitutional treatment; the one suffering part may be the whole case. And in many chronic cases certain organs claim and must have special attention.”
“To avoid misapprehension in one or two particulars. 1st, what I understand by an organ remedy is not a drug that is topically applied to a suffering organ for its physical or chemical effects, but a remedy that has an elective affinity for such organ, by reason of which it will find the organ itself through the blood. Further I do not regard organopathy as something outside Homoeopathy, but as being embraced by, and included in it, or co-extensive with it. I would say-Organopathy is Homoeopathy in the first degree. Finally, I would emphasize the fact, that where the homoeopathic similimal agent covering the totality of the symptoms, and also the underlying pathologic process causing such symptoms can be found, there organopathy either has no raison d’ etre at all, or it is of only temporary service to ease an organ in distress.”
“I am much struck with the teaching of Rademacher* *Rademacher, the exponent of organopathy, had disciples who formed a school and published a journal in 1847. Burnett says they wandered off into the field of experimental pharmacology, but found it already occupied by whom? by the homoeopaths! The wanderers, he says, never came back, but remained in the field of provings, side by side with the followers of Hahnemann. that a very large percentage of dropsies are curable by spleen remedies.”
“Since writing the foregoing in 1879 I have found a good many chronic cases of spleen affections, and those for the most part previously unrecognized.”
In one of his cases, “the spleen would not leave off swelling at certain times till I had cured the vaccinosis. The prince of splenics, Ceanothus Americanus, readily cured the splenic engorgement, but did not touch the blood disease which caused it. This is the inherent defect of organopathy, that it is not sufficiently radical in its inceptive action; but the like remark applies to every other pathy more or less, because the primordial cause is more or less elusive and generally quite beyond positive science, which only admits of what it knows, and will not seek to encompass the unknown, by the processes of thinking and reasoning. Because in former times philosophy made science impossible, the votaries of science now round upon philosophy and sneer it out of view. To trace back proximate effects to remote causes is now ridiculed because mere science is productive of a gross mindedness, incapable of following the fine threads of the higher perception.”
In another of his cases there was a pain on the left side, which has lasted for quite twenty-five years. It came suddenly, especially if she drank anything cold. She would get an indescribable pain under the left ribs, and she would have to fight for breath, and the dyspnoea would be so severe that it could be heard in the next room, frightening everybody. She had ague thirty years ago. Before taking the Ceanothus, for many years she was compelled to lie down when dressing in the morning on account of the beating of the heart. This was a case of much enlarged spleen, with tenderness that could not bear any pressure-from clothing even. Ceanothus cured; and Burnett records one of the “sweetest things of his whole professional life-the old lady (and what a lady!) put a tiny packet on my desk, tried to say something, burst into tears, and rushed out! He says, “I never saw her again, and have often wished I had kept that particular sovereign and had it set in diamonds.” (The patient was a char-woman he had been asked to help, since she was said to be suffering from an incurable disease of the heart. He had promised, after examination, to cure her; and the lady who had asked his help for the poor old creature, accused him of cruelty for “raising her hopes, when he must have known it is impossible!” His explanation that it was an enlarged spleen, and not the heart at all, was not believed. “She had been under various doctors, and all had declared it incurable heart disease.” It was cured, nevertheless!)
In regard to heart troubles, he tells us that, “Where the heart is perturbed constantaneously with a spleen affection, the relief obtained from the use of Ceanothus (and other splenics) is very often noteworthy.”
And, “With regard to dropsies, in so far as they are not due to organismic affections, I ascribe, according to a rough calculation, about one-third to the spleen.”
Other useful suggestions are:
“Some cases of varicosis will not get well till you cure the spleen of its, perhaps slight, enlargement.”
Again, “In one case, where the patient has been under good symptomatic homoeopathic prescribing, which had failed, because the symptoms treated were secondary to the enlargement of the spleen. It must be manifest that vomiting due to an enlarged spleen can never be cured by remedies that physiologically produce vomiting, but by such as will bring a large spleen back to the normal.”
