November 2nd.–M.B. Better night. Less vomiting.
November 3rd.–Less well, fits of coughing, with (?) a whoop. Drosera 1m, one dose.
It was whooping-cough, and the baby was well within fourteen days.
Hughes quotes Jousset as saying that the power of Drosera in spasmodic coughs is one of the best illustrations we have of the efficacy of infinitesimal doses. The definition of its sphere of action being, “Cough from tickling in larynx, with vomiting of food.” Jousset quoted 107 cases, of which 101 were cured or relieved.
Hahnemann’s whooping-cough symptoms include:–
Cough, coming from quite deep down in the chest.
Cough, the impulses of which follow one another so violently that he can hardly get his breath.
Crawling in the larynx which provokes, coughing.
Cough ending in vomiting, etc.
But Hughes, who questions Hahnemann’s single dose of the 30th potency, quarrels also with Curie’s crude dosage. When Hughes tried to follow Curie with drop doses of the strong tincture of Drosera four times a day, he only succeeded “in setting up a most violent spasmodic cough in a phthisical patient, which subsided into the ordinary cough of phthisis when the medicine was discontinued.” “Others have had similar experience”, he says.
No! Hahnemann’s way of using “this uncommonly heroic drug” is undoubtedly the safest and most efficacious.
But remember that Homoeopathy knows no specifics, and treats no named diseases per se. And if you think that Drosera will cure every case of whooping-cough that comes along, you will discover sooner or later that it is not so. In one epidemic it is recorded that Kali carb. was the remedy, and, once found, cured every case.
The case that opened my eyes, accidentally, to the value of Drosera in SPINAL CARIES was one that was sent in to me by one of the Surgeons, when I was running our Children’s Department during the War. It was a small boy of four. He had started a T. B. finger at twelve months, and spinal caries six months later. He had been treated by our Children’s Physician and by one of our Surgeons, and was lying on a board with double Thomas splint and headpiece. He had improved, on the whole, under treatment, with fluctuations. He got very thin at one time, and there was threatening of lung trouble, and night sweats; but Tuberculinum, Phosphorus, Calcarea, etc., had helped. The Surgeon now sent him in for whooping-cough: not a desirable occupation for one who was supposed to maintain a restful recumbent position! He got a dose of Drosera 200.
When next seen, two months later, the mother was so enthusiastic as to the good effects of the last medicine on the child’s health that I began to “sit up and take notice”. Another two months and he was found to be “eating well; putting on flesh. Fat and flourishing”. The change in the child was really amazing. The remedy was repeated at long intervals. When last seen some three years later, the note is, “Boy’s spine is very good. He has not worn apparatus two years. Goes to school for the last six months.”
One remembers another case of spinal caries (cervical) in a boy of seven years. He started at four years old with a knee, then a finger, then his neck. He had been treated at other hospitals. He had also had fits, and ear discharge, and was brought in a spinal carriage; never allowed to sit up. He was a happy little fellow, with an extraordinary deformed neck, which he would move from side to side with alarming jerks. He got Drosera 200, and began to improve at once; and was soon able to turn his head easily, all ways. In two or three months, with the approval of one of our Surgeons, he was allowed to sit up, and he made steady progress, with very intermittent treatment, till a couple of years later it was reported to me that his parents (in spite of warning) “took him flying about the country in the side car of a motor cycle– long journeys, sitting up, his neck being joggled all the time”. He rapidly put on flesh, and one of my notes four years after treatment began reads, “Looking very well. Active. Good colour. Father takes him out all day in his van. Does not mind the jolts.” And later, I was told that “nothing new in the way of his disease had occurred since first he came here four and a half years ago”. Till then there had been a succession of T. B. manifestation.
One more spinal case–scoliosis in a young woman, with extreme deformity: and –a T. B. history. She was suffering and sickly. She had had a recent fall, and a very gentle manipulation, done in fear and trembling, ended the pain in her back, and Drosera, for her family history, made something hardly recognizable of her. She comes for occasional help, and remains robust and healthy-looking.
I am allowed to quote a case, showing the value of Drosera in TUBERCULOUS SINUSES. Boy, 13 1/2. For eight months there had been a swelling, constantly recurring in right forearm, followed by several areas left arm. When opened, pus oozed out, but the discharges would not cease. There was a bad T.B. history on both sides of family. The boy had three considerable areas of typical tuberculous-looking tissue, which alternately scabbed and broke down.
Tuberculinum and Silica helped. Then Drosera 200 was given and a month later the scars were found to be freely movable (this is a typical Drosera result,–the three drugs one has seen dealing successfully with scar tissue being Graphites, Silicea and Drosera; and, where tuberculous scars are concerned, the greatest of these is Drosera). Treatment was continued till, six months after the first dose, it was so extraordinarily cured that the note is, “Discoloration faint. In certain lights the skin looks almost normal.” And–“the boy was well, fat and flourishing.”
Where Drosera helps, results are very soon seen, and invariably in renewed health and spirits, and in utterly changed appearance. I have seen this so often. The patient who needs Drosera and gets it, simply blooms. There is no other word for it.
It was the relief of atrocious nightly pain in a diseases tibia, where a number of remedies had failed, that made me realize that Hahnemann was right when, in his Materia Medica Pura, under Drosera, he put “pain in the long bones” in big black type; and that those who followed him in compiling materia medicas, and transcribed these symptoms of his relating to bones and joints, were wrong. They have robbed us of many brilliant results, by reducing the type of what he stressed as so important.
But unfortunately everyone since Hahnemann’s day, who writes about, or attempts to practise homoeopathy, is always prepared (without the colossal studies, experiments, experience and knowledge of Hahnemann to go one better.
I suggest that we all, forthwith, open our materia medicas, whether Clarke’s Allen’s or Boericke’s at Drosera, and underline in red all the black type symptoms Hahnemann gives us, of what he calls, “one of the most powerful medicinal herbs in our zone”.
In Curie’s first cat, killed after six weeks of Drosera, besides T.B. lesions of pleura, he says: “I found a very considerable enlargement of the mesenteric glands.”
In his second cat, killed after a year, there were also. T.B. abdominal lesions–spleen–Peyer’s patches–and of the “shut vesicles of the large intestine”. ALL THREE CATS HAD DIARRHOEA.
And Curie says, of his cats:–
Drosera causes the production of tubercular elements in the lungs, and acts at the same time on the lymphatic system in general.
And in his second cat, killed after a year of Drosera, there were ENORMOUS SUBMAXILLARY GLANDS.
A girl of 19: “Gets attacks of diarrhoea, and cannot go to business.” Had had “fourteen attacks” in twenty-four hours at Christmas, now (in May) gets about five stools a day–loose; at times, mucous. At Christmas passed blood : not now. Any pain is in left abdomen.
Abdomen was boggy, and a nodule was felt on left side–a typical “T.B. abdomen.”
Some improvement followed with Sulph., Lilium tigr., and Tuberculinum bov. And in August she got a dose of Drosera in high potency.
The September note is: “Getting on splendidly. Takes food better.” “Goes to business now!” Was seen at intervals for another year, when an interesting note is, “She never complained of diarrhoea or of indigestion after Drosera was first given.”
One has had a number of cases of cervical glands doing well under Drosera, some of them after long treatment here or elsewhere, and with a great deal of ugly scarring.
What one invariably notices is that the cases that react to this drug, react rapidly, with astonishing improvement in general health and well-being. Where they do not rapidly react, I know that I have not got my remedy. But over and over again I find recorded in Drosera cases, and often on the very next visit “patient looks blooming”. I do not think this expression occurs– it certainly does not occur constantly, in my records in regard to any other remedy.
In Drosera GLAND cases one notices, as I said, not only the diminution in the size of the gland, but that the old scars fade away, get free, and come to the surface; that discoloration goes, and that when a gland does break down under Drosera, it behaves in a very restrained manner, with a small opening, little discharge, and that it leaves practically nothing to mark what has taken place.
