Many of the discharges are fetid; watery stools of most disgusting odour; profuse and greenish: fetid flatus the fetid smell of the drug may be regarded as one of its “signatures.” Periosteal affections ending in ulcers which are so sensitive that no dressing is tolerated.” (Hep.).
GUERNSEY says: A very great sensitiveness, hypersensitiveness, especially in those in whom the venous system predominates over the arterial. It affects left hypochondriac region; left abdomen; left neck, and nape of neck, left upper and lower extremities, left ear. General symptoms left side.
Dissatisfied about oneself. Complains of her troubles.
Fetid or purulent discharges from ears: green and fetid from nose. Ozaena.
Fatty taste: risings in throat. Loathing; inclination to vomit. Pulsations pit of stomach, perceptible to hand and even eye.
Asafoetida, then is a drug of very definite localities and modalities. It vents itself on the mind, the nerves, the organs of special sense, the digestive tract, the periosteum, and especially on the left side. Curious how since drugs pick out the right side, some the left. WHY? But it is the same with patients: one comes whose every ailment is on the left side; another, on the right. A study of these remedies is often useful in prescribing.
The black type drugs that are very especially left sided are ARG. N., ASAR., CAPS., CINA, CLEM., CROC., EUPHORB., GRAPH., KRE., LACH., OLEAND, PHOS., SELEN., SEP., STANN.
The very especially right-sided remedies in black type, are given as ARS., AUR., BAPT., BELL., BOR., CANTH., LYC., PULS., RAN.B., SARS., SEC., SUL. AC.
Then there are others especially right or left sided, as APIS, ARG., BRY., CALC., CHEL., COLOC., RAN. S. SULPH.
Some, again(but everyone knows these) start right side, and cross to right as LACH.: or go from side to side and then back, as LAC CAN. One has seen this in throats, in diphtheria, and, in the latter case, in ovarian pain. There are so many interesting and intriguing things in homoeopathy that help in prescribing. .
The Asafoetida patient (i.e. the patient most affected by, and therefore most amenable to the curative action of Asafoetida), is described as being of a plethoric appearance, face puffed, bloated, even dropsical “puffed, venous, purple”. Kent calls it “a very troublesome face, suggesting cardiac disturbance and venous stasis”. (These patients have the extreme sensitiveness that make you think of such remedies as Hepar). “Fat, flabby, purple: and therewith extremely sensitive to pain, full of hysteria.”
Such persons may have ulcers, extremely sensitive, and extremely offensive. Periostitis, especially of tibia (Asaf. is one of the drugs that go for the tibia, viewing with AGAR., LACH., RHUS, etc. and DROS.). One remembers a bad case of Pagets disease of the tibia, with atrocious pain, where none of these drugs helped, but DROS., with its pain in long bones, acted marvellously, restoring painlessness and sleep.
No one seems to have realized the power in bone disease of Drosera, except Hahnemann! It is worth while getting a copy of Materia Medica Pura, now that it has been republished in facsimile form at a moderate price. It is a book one would not be without anywhere!.
Asafoetida is one of the remedies of “old scars, when they turn purple and threaten to suppurate”, “take on a venous aspect and become painful and turn black”.
We keep on quoting KENT: let us run through his masterly picture of the drug, condensing:-.
Full of discharges; catarrhal, watery, from different places, even watery stools: and all these discharges are horribly offensive and ichorous. Bloody discharges, horribly offensive, from nose, eyes, ears, chest, bowels, fistula openings, ulcers. The phlegmatic person who is purple, who gets no sympathy when sick, and is almost distracted about the horrible fetid discharges. Even the discharges from the eyes may be bloody and offensive.
Most of the pains seem to bore, as if they extended from the bone to the surface, from within out. .
Then numbness: a general feature of this remedy. Numbness of scalp, or deep in head: numb, dead feeling associated with the pain (Cham., Plat.). Often, numbness after sleep. Numbness of nose.
Hysteria: ball rises, as in globus hystericus. Hysterical and choreic affections of oesophagus and trachea. This “lump in the throat, or suffocation”, is a sort of hysterical spasm of the oesophagus.
Stomach. If you have ever seen a typical cases of Asaf. you will wonder where all the air comes from. It comes up in volumes: choreic jerking of the diaphragm, with expulsion of wind like the sound of a small pop-gun going off almost every second. Loud belching: loud eructations of wind from the stomach flatus not downward, but all upwards always horribly offensive. Meteorism. And liquid stools of most disgusting smell. .
Asaf. is one of the remedies having nightly aggravations. .
The direction of Asaf., then, is from within, out. The heart feels over full to bursting. The nose as if it would burst. Abdominal distention, as if everything in the body would burst out through the mouth.
Asaf. has a symptom one has not observed elsewhere, but which one finds recorded in the poisonings, in the Cyclopaedia of Drug Pathogenesy: “undulating twitchings in muscles.” One saw this recently while actually reading up the drug, in a patient; undulating twitchings in upper arm especially; ripples, wave like, in the arm muscles front and back. The patient seems to have seen them first, rather felt them. She has received Asaf. and it will be interesting to hear the outcome. But nerve specialists in London and in Belgium confessed that they had never seen this before: and proceeded to give a rather terrible diagnosis: which other system did not, so far, seem to bear out.
Asaf. is one of the drugs that affect the secretion of milk; causing its disappearance; its increased flow; even its appearance in the breasts of non-pregnant, or elderly, women; as in a woman of 50, where “the breasts swelled and secreted a milky fluid”.
$ EDITORIAL
[Homoeopathy & the War].
Homoeopathy By Dr M L Tyler.
# 1938 Oct Vol VII No 10.
^ Tyler M L.
~ Editorial.
` ==.
“Mens hearts failing them for fear and for looking for these things that are coming upon the earth”.
We are asked to suggest remedies, as “Air Raid Precautions.” . . War to go upon.
One remembers well the brave little nurses in the darkened Wards: how they would come forward to whisper how frightened they were: Ign. seemed to help. Brave little Britons ! None of the patients were allowed to have any idea that their hearts were also quailing. Some Sisters would draw the beds into the centre of the Ward, and tell the patients they were safe that way ! As a matter of fact, as one discovered by going about and seeing the result of bombs, the greatest safety was to get a wall behind you.
Plate glass, in jagged fragments was one of terrible dangers in London. One victim in our mortuary had her head cleft in twain, the uninjured face being a mere mask; and plate glass, in sharp spikiness, was in all the wounds in that raid. One remembers a woman patient, frantic with fear after one of the raids: “Where could she go ? They might come again ! If she went into the country, they might come there !” She was almost off here head. But she got a dose of Ars. and subsided promptly into the usual calm of the rest.
We were set in the midst of the raids: a big bomb, one of the very first, left its crater to this day in Queens Square, tearing all the windows out of that side of the Hospital. The off-duty nurses flocked out to see, and to climb down into the hole: one confessed that she could not tread on her nightgown ! On another night, eight minor bombs tell in Ormond Yard, just across the street: some duds, some incendiary bombs which set two houses on fire.
And the little children who were brought to out-patients from those slums! One mite of a girl announced proudly, ” I saved four!” Her mother had been too frightened to move, but she had got the little ones out safety. Another wee girl came weeping; her tiny brother was hurt.
She had been carrying him out, and (nearly down stairs) had jumped with him, and fallen. But to the terrified children one whispered, ” Afraid ? Why, you can flight the Germans ! You can pray that the bombs may fall in places where they hurt no one !” which happened so often that an idea actually got about, that open spaces between the houses “drew the bombs!”.
We had wards full of damaged sailors in those days” and what they did was to take their pillows and leaving their mattresses on the beds above, retire to sleep under them. Had the ceilings come down they had shelter. One heard of little families saved by sheltering under a kitchen table.
Then, as to gas masks. Before these came into being, or were obtainable at the front, the soldiers would soak their thick socks in urine, and lightly wringing them out, cover mouth and nose. The urine neutralize the gas, and saved them. But one is told that they paid the penalty of unsterilized socks with Sycosis barbae.
Hahnemann's three major publications chart the development of homeopathy. In the Organon of Medicine, we see the fundamentals laid out. Materia Medica Pura records the exact symptoms of the remedy provings. In his book, The Chronic Diseases, Their Peculiar Nature and Their Homoeopathic Cure, he showed us how natural diseases become chronic in nature when suppressed by improper treatment.