“Perspiration from mental exertion: stains linen yellow. Nightsweats. Sensitive to changes in the weather; to cold damp, or warm damp weather : to rainy weather. Worse before a storm: sensitive to every electric change in the weather.”
In regard to one’s own personal experiences–well!–their name is legion. It is a drug that comes continually into use in outpatient work, in cases that hang fire and that give a T.B. family history. “Any consumption?–father, mother, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts?” is one of the first questions one puts to a new patient, with questions as to vaccinations, and previous illnesses. The answers may save much work. Used as a powerful intercurrent, where cases, with that history, hang fire, one has often felt, after tardily prescribing the drug, “If I’d only started with it, how much quicker we should have got on!”–such a big difference has it made to the patient.
When a pneumonia hangs fire, and refuses to clear up, and a T.B. history is elicited, and Tuberculinum bov. (generally 200 for preference) is given, there is apt to be a rise of temperature for a few hours, then it drops and does not rise again, while the patient makes the desired recovery. It may help, in the same way, an acute rheumatism, where carefully prescribed remedies have failed to benefit.
It appears to be complementary to Drosera and Silica; these drugs seems to play into each other’s hands, so to speak, especially in cases of T.B. bones and glands: also in some cases mental deficiency with that taint.
One could tell wonderful tales of T.B. glands and bone cases, treated in our children’s clinic. One should probably add Calcarea and Silicea–but with less of remembered personal experience.
Again, Tuberculinum comes in specially to regulate menstrual activities–in persons with the family history, or with tell- tale scars in the neck, etc. One thinks of it when menses are late to appear, or are too profuse, or even painful,, or scanty. One has seen Burnett’s suggestion in regard to its use in arrested development, mental or physical, bear fruit. In the case of one young woman, who had never succeeded in getting anything like her full complement of teeth through and who, after a dose of Tuberculinum produced (to her surprise also)–I think it was eight in a couple of weeks.
One began with Burnett and his wonderful little book: we will now end with it: remembering that it was his Bacillinum, made direct from active, advanced tuberculosis, that he used. He details over fifty cases in his first edition, and a number more in the two succeeding editions, which are bound together to form one volume.
He gives many cases of children with brain troubles; for instance–Child about 20 months old, with, for days, high fever, restlessness and constant screaming: in a “fallen in and collapsing state”. A peculiarly fetid smell about the child, and a strong family history of consumption. After a dose of Bacc., in high potency, the child fell asleep within ten minutes and screamed no more. Made a rapid and complete recovery. He needed two more doses later on : and his head, in course of time, became quite shapely, and he “a gifted boy”.
Many of the cases recounted of phthisis, etc., had been vaccinated, and received benefit from Thuja also: and many of the cases during somewhat lengthy treatment, required other constitutional remedies. In regard to this Burnett writes:
“As to the use of the other remedies, I would especially insist on the fact that the phthisic virus only acts within its own sphere, and that this sphere is very sharply defined as to time, and what it does not do soon, and promptly, it does not do at all. Its action is, if I may so express myself, acute: its chronic equivalent in Psorinum.” But he explains in a footnote, “When I say soon, I mean that the action begins at once; only, of course, as phthisic processes are generally chronic, the treatment must also be the same, i.e. chronic.”
In cases of miserable, ailing, hopeless-seeming children, Burnett says, “Having grown wiser, and fully recognizing that the stop-spot of such remedies as Aconite, Chamomilla, Pulsatilla,” which had helped, “was a long way on the hither side of a cure”, he said to himself.” `This sort of remedy only goes up to the tubercle, and the tubercle-sphere is their stop-points. But it is the tubercles that kill!’ I therefore began with the phthisic virus.”
He tells us, he used the Bacillic virus “Always in very infrequent dose : this is to be understood in all his cases, so he need not restate this all-important fact.” His potencies were the 30th, 100th, and 200th.
Case XXIII is interesting. An author of eminence, with terrible pain in the head, almost absolute sleeplessness and profound adynamia: had had phthisis, with blood-spitting for years, with a solid right lung, but who had “grown out” of his consumptiveness. His brothers and sisters had died of water on the brain. He was being “shadowed” on advice, as he was thought to be on the verge of insanity. The pain in his head is “as if he had a tight hoop of iron round it; and he has a distressing sensation of damp clothes on his spine. It sounds hardly credible, but in less than a month after beginning with the virus the pain in the head had gone, the sensation of damp clothes had gone, and his sleep was fairly good. He got a few more doses at long intervals, then needed to further treatment. Continued in good health, hard at work finishing his forthcoming publication.:
Many cases of consumption are here cured–the earlier cases: but Burnett gives a case “which is quite in accordance with my previous experience; when the consumptive process is in full blaze the virus is unavailing.” (This is of course what is called galloping consumption. And such is, I believe, the general experience. In fact one has come to think that Tuberculinum is more useful in “consumptiveness”, and in cases where structures other than lungs are affected.)
Burnett gives several cases of phthisis, less rapid, which yielded to occasional doses of Bacillinum, intercurrently with other homoeopathic remedies, as demanded by symptoms;or, where a double chronic affection, such as “tuberculosis” plus “vaccinosis” co-existed, with occasional doses of first Thuja then Bacillinum.
Of course Burnett was looked upon as an innovator and sharply criticised by some of his homoeopathic confreres; indeed he was a person about whom some of them could not “speak comfortably”. But in all this he was only following Hahnemann, whom they also professed to follow–more or less–and who, sixty years earlier had pointed out, in regard to his (then) three chronic miasms, that two or more might co-exist in a chronic patient, interfering with his normal reactions to indicated remedies, and that these miasms would require to be “annihilated” one by one.
But–he warns us–“Leave to each medicine the necessary time to complete its action.”
Sixty odd years earlier, then, Hahnemann had already reached the “stop-spot” of the obvious remedies of present symptoms in chronic disease: but not the “stop-spot” of his deductive genius. Utterly refusing to acknowledge the failure of Homoeopathy in these cases of apparent failure, he realized that it was just a question of further extension of the principle, and of digging deeper into causes. Therefore he set to work, “day and night, for ten years,” to elucidate the matter, and arrived at the parasitic nature of chronic disease, and at the fact that remedies homoeopathic to their primary manifestations must be employed–in turn, where more than one such disease was in question–if real progress towards cure were to be achieved and all this years before the microscope began to confirm him in regard to their real parasitic nature.
Burnett, in his turn, came up against the stop-spot of the remedies of present conditions and symptoms “on the hither-side of a cure”, where one of the “chronic miasms”, tubercle, was in question. Such remedies as Aconite, Pulsatilla, Chamomilla and their like, “only go up to tubercle: the tubercle-sphere is their stop-spot”; so he began to interpose doses of the tubercle- virus.
But, in the same way–and this one must take to heart!–he found the stop-spot of the T.B. virus, which acts within its own sphere only. Other remedies, he says, “are needed for the non- consumptive part of the case”.
It is thought, by inferences from his writings, that Hahnemann was already working with other disease-products as remedies, besides the one (Psorinum) which he proved and gave to the world. He designated certain drugs, as needed intercurrently when treating chronic cases–notably “The best preparation of Mercury” on the one hand and Thuja or Nitric acid on the other, where the chronicity was based on one or other of the venereal diseases. But here, within their limits, the most potent of all are the disease-products themselves. Hahnemann’s “isopathic remedies” changed, as the contends, by preparation, till no longer “idem”, the same, but “simillimum”–“like or “homoeopathic”, are by far the closest “like”, and of that there can be no question.
