Some of my cases of ague cured with nettle tincture were most severe ones, invalided home from India and Burmah. And quite lately a patient in Siam, to whom I had sent a big bottle of nettle tincture, wrote me, `The tincture you sent us has very greatly mitigated the fever we get here. Please order us another bottle.'”
“I say almost every case has yielded to Urtica urens; every case, of course, has not.”
This use is also homoeopathic, for Burnett says,” Urtica urens, in my hands, has produced fever over and over again.” One sensitive to whom he gave rather large doses of the O reported, “I cannot go on with this medicine, it sets all my pulses beating, makes me terribly giddy as if I were going to topple forwards in my bed, and then a bad headache comes on; and when I take it at night it makes me very feverish.”
In an Indian officer, suffering from Scinde boils (? of malarial origin), to whom Burnett gave Urtica, this “was followed by a furious outburst of fever, so severe that his condition caused his friends considerable anxiety”. But “he made a quick and complete recovery”
In another such case, followed by very severe fever with usually long stages, the patient recovered under Nat. mur. Burnett says, “It is distinctly curious to note the remarkable effects of Natrum muriaticum and Urtica urens in gout as well as in ague and malarialism.”
GOUT. Urtica urens was one of Burnett’s great remedies, not only for malaria and ague-cake (he found in it a powerful “splenic”, but also” for its gravel-expelling power” and for gout.
He says, “Patients under the influence of small material doses of Urtica will often pass quantities of gravel”; (one of his patients” used to point to a spot under her spleen as her gravel pit”) and he says, “when I observed others who, being under the influence of Urtica urens, passed grit and gravel pretty freely for the first time in their lives, I came to the conclusion that Urtica possesses the power of eliminating urates from the economy. And it slowly became clear to my mind that Urtica might be the very remedy I had long been in quest of, viz., a quickly- acting, easily-obtained homoeopathic remedy for the ATTACKS of gout, or some of them; for of course we, of experience, never expect uniform results, any more than we expect all the trees of the forest to be of the same height”.
He says, “I have no faith in gout cures unless they thicken the urine.” And he says, “in acute gout, it cuts short the attack in a safe manner, viz., by riding the economy of the disease product, its actual suffering-producing material.”
His usual way was to give five drops of the mother tincture in a wineglassful of quite warm water, say every two or three hours; and a few hours later he would hear, “Oh! the pain is gone, and I have passed a lot of gravel.”
Acute gout was more common in his day, than with us: but I remember one case in a lady, whose foot was red and swollen and intensely painful, and who was in the habit of getting gouty attacks. Urtica urens O cured very promptly.
For his success in curing acute gout, Dr.Burnett came to be known as “Dr. URTICA” in London West-end Clubland.
Then again, for suppression of urine, and uraemia. One remembers a small boy, dying of tubercular meningitis, where the urine was suppressed, and the body had a highly urinous odour. A few drops of the strong tincture of stinging nettles caused the passage of urine, and the odour disappeared, and life was, protem., prolonged. The same restoration of the urinary function was seen in a case of uraemia in the hospital a few years ago.
Burnett’s little book is crowded with brilliant cases, told in his inimitable style; we are here giving only the results of his experiences.
As said, he used Urtica “in small material doses”, repeated pretty frequently (since they were acute illness) for some days.
In the course of his so using the remedy he got, as we have seen some pretty severe provings in some of his patients, which show the homoeopathicity of the drug: as able to cause, as well as to cure.
It was in exactly this way that Hahnemann started, originally, when administering his “similars”. Then he had to dilute, to avoid severe aggravation; this especially where poisonous drugs were concerned. Then, going further and further in attenuation-as it seemed!- he discovered that Dilutions became Potencies.
Poor and culpepper! how surprised he would have been to learn that he was advocating Homoeopathy an odd hundred years before its time!-just as Moiere’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme was enchanted with the wonderful news that he had been speaking prose all his life! But Culpepper only tells what he knew had cured. While we know that what will cure, will also cause.
By the way, if you are being stung by a mosquito, don’t smack it dead on your face, thus expressing its maximum poison: but flick it off lightly.
In the same way, if you have the misfortune to be badly stung by nettles, don’t “rub it in” but pass a sharp knife lightly over the painful places, after the manner of shaving, and so extract those little terrors, the poison hairs.
After all this, I think we shall all GRASP THE NETTLE; remembering that it is only out of sufferings that we can ever extract CURE.
The strong tincture of Arnica applied to a wasp sting, prevents the pain and swelling, and in a couple of hours the sting is forgotten.
Urtica is said to do likewise for bee stings.
And Cantharis 200, given internally, quickly cures the inflamed and horrible swellings that may follow gnat bites.
