Henbane.
Introduction
Hyoscyamus is said to be especially poisonous to fowls: hence its name. Some animals eat it, especially the young shoots, with impunity: but its effects even here are more or less purgative.’
Hahnemann tell us that, when dried, the plant loses a great portion of its medicinal powers. But this is the case with many of the plant remedies: one needs to employ a competent homoeopathic chemist always, in prescribing.
Old school uses Hyoscyamus and Hyoscine as “cerebral depressants, in acute mania, delirium tremens, febrile delirium and insomnia, sometimes, with good results. They are mostly used in asylum practice”. The drug is also “put in to stop griping when Aloes, etc., are used for purgation”.
Poisoning, provings and experience of Hyoscyamus show its very definite range of action, also its striking resemblances to its natural relations, Belladonna and Stramonium. But it is, all through, easily distinguished from them.
In DELIRIUM it has its own peculiar features. Like Belladonna it causes and cures cases with “increased cerebral activity”, but with Hyoscyamus, unlike Belladonna, they are non-inflammatory in type. One peculiar symptom belongs pre-eminently to Hyoscyamus: “desire to uncover.” iN INSANITY Hyoscyamus may act as a mountebank, grimacing and making ridiculous gestures, and displaying a “comical alienation of mind”-or displaying a horrible “lascivious mania”, all its own. “In FEVERS the Hyoscyamus patients throw the bedclothes off not because off not because they are too warm, but because they will not remain covered.” “A keynote for Hyoscyamus in fevers is, that the patient will not remain covered. “(Later on we will quote KENT, who discusses this question.)
And here, in regard to Hyoscyamus in fevers, we cannot do better than quote from Hahnemann’s description of an epidemic of war typhus in Leipsic in 1813 (the year before waterloo) where he treated 183 cases, “of which not one died”.
If the case had gone beyond Bryonia and Rhus, into its second period of delirium (“a metastasis of the whole disease upon the mental organs)” ” the patient ceases to complain of his symptoms, he is not, does not desire to drink, does not know whether to take this or that, does not know those about him, he abuses them, makes irrelevant answer, talks nonsense with open eyes, does foolish things, wishes to run away, cries aloud or whines, without being able to say why he does so, has a rattling in the throat, the countenance is distorted, the eyes squinting, he plays with his hand, behaves like a madman, passes the excrements unconsciously, etc. Should the disease pass into that stage of delirium and mania, the Hyoscyamus niger meets all the indications of the case.” A still later, third stage, of practical paralysis, mental and physical, may need the Sweet Spirits of Nitre, he tells us. N.B.-We reproduced in HOMOEOPATHY, July 1935, this most interesting description Hahnemann’s successful treatment of the terrible epidemic that followed the wars of Napoleon. It is well worth studying.
The CHOREIC symptoms of Hyoscyamus are definite enough and unmistakable. “Every muscle of the body twitches, from the eyes to the toes.” “Constant state of erethism: not a single part of the whole body, nor a solitary muscle in a quiet state for a moment. Convulsive motions. Spasms: spasms clonic.”
The Hyoscyamus chorea, unlike ” the gyratory motions of Stramonium” has the coarse angular jerks that hurl the patient about, and make a pitiful little object look in danger of turning herself inside out with a jerk, when told to put out her tongue. Hughes speaks also of “local chorea”-squinting, stammering, twitchings of face.
In the EPILEPSY of Hyoscyamus there is, before the fit, vertigo, ringing in ears, sparks before eyes, gnawing hunger: during the fit, face purple, eyes projecting, shrieks, grinding teeth and enuresis: followed by sopor and snoring. Belladonna has spasms of larynx and clutching of throat during fit. In Stramonium there is risus sardonicus, and quick thrustings of head to the right. Stramonium has also “a stupid friendly look”.
Of course Hyoscyamus is “beautifully homoeopathic” to DELIRIUM TREMENS, and to HYDROPHOBIA. We will quote at length a footnote of Hahnemann’s (Materia Medica Pura-Hyoscyamus). He tells us that:-
For some cases of hydrophobia Belladonna is curative, for some Stramonium, while for others (according to the symptoms he enumerates,) Hyoscyamus. “Belladonna”, he says, “has already effected some perfect cures, and would have done this more frequently, had not either other interposing remedies been administered at the same time, or, and especially, had it not been given in such enormous doses that the patients were killed by the remedy.” He adds, what is interesting and important, in italics:
“Large doses of drugs, homoeopathically suitable, are much more certainly injurious than such as are given without any similar (homoeopathic) relation to the disease, or such as have an opposite (antipathic) relation `o the case, that is to say, are quite unsuitable (allopathic). In the homoeopathic employment of medicines, where the totality of the morbid symptoms has a great similarity to the action of a drug, it is really criminal not to give quite small doses, indeed as small as possible. In such cases the doses of the size prescribed in the routine practice become real poisons and murderous agents. Convinced by a thousand-fold experience, I assert this of the Homoeopathic employment of medicines universally and invariably, particularly when the disease is acute; and this is especially true of the employment of Belladonna, Stramonium, and Hyoscyamus in hydrophobia. So let it not be said, `One of these three medicines was given in the strongest doses, and not too seldom, but every two or three hours, and yet the patient died.’ `That was precisely the reason’, I reply with firm conviction, `that was precisely the reason why the patient died, and you killed him.’ Had you let him take the smallest portion of a drop of the quintillion-fold or decillion-fold attenuation of the juice of one of these plants for a dose (in rare cases repeating the dose after three or four days) then the patient would have been easily and certainly saved.”
Here is an accidental proving of Hyoscyamus:
A doctor tells how he once gave to a woman with hysterical paralysis, who had been in bed a month, an injection of Hyoscine 1/50 of a grain. She got up in ten minutes, ran round and round the room as if intoxicated, shrieking with laughter; jumped into bed, shrieking with laughter, and jumped out the other side: couldn’t be kept in bed. Next day she could remember nothing-only knew that she had been doing something foolish. Then she went slowly back to her old state.
“Hyoscyamus is a drug of strikingly alternating symptoms. As, – The calls to stool and frequent evacuation of henbane are alternating actions with the delayed stool and absence of call thereto: but the former appears to be the principal primary action. Hahnemann indeed senses a two-fold alternating action: `much urging with rare evacuations:- and more frequent evacuation with rarer calls:- with little or no evacuation, also with more frequent evacuations. But the frequent urging with the scanty and rare evacuations is the principal alternating action.'” *Footnotes, Materia Medorrhinum Pura.
Again,- “The excitation of the bladder of urinate and its loss of irritability- the scanty flow of urine and the copious diuresis are in henbane alternating actions, so hat much urging to urinate with scanty and copious flow of urine-as also inactivity of the bladder with scanty and very copious secretion of urine may be present at the same time; but much urging to urinate with scanty flow seems to be the principal, more frequent primary action.” *Footnotes, Materia Medorrhinum Pura.
And again,- “The overwakefulness is in henbane an alternating action with drowsiness and sleep, but the over-wakefulness seems to be the chief primary action.” *Footnotes, Materia Medorrhinum Pura.
But the uses of Hyoscyamus are not confined to desperate conditions. For instance, it is a prompt and effective remedy in a not very serious, but very annoying form of COUGH. One has many times seen its success here, and been told by the grateful patient, “You are wonderful!” But it is Homoeopathy that is wonderful, when drug-picture and disease-picture match. The cough is a spasmodic, or a dry, tickling spasmodic cough, by night: especially by night. The patient lies down, and coughs, and coughs, and coughs; sits up, and ceases to cough; lies down again, and coughs and coughs and coughs; sits up again, and again finds peace. This may go on all night, and night after night till Hyoscyamus is given and that finishes it.
The most notable remedies of suspicion and jealousy are LACH., HYOS., PLUS., Nux and Stramonium
An interesting case of Hyoscyamus jealousy will bear repeating here, where it belongs.
A boy, mentally deficient, was, among other things, frightfully jealous, especially of the man his sister was engaged to. Whenever he came to the house the boy “was very naughty, and passed his stool into his trousers”. Hyoscyamus was found to have the symptom, involuntary stool from excitement. He got a dose of Hyoscyamus cm, and the next report was that “people remarked how much quieter he was, and that though the sister’s finance had been staying in the house, he had not been jealous”.
