Miss A.S., forty-two yours old, of light complexion, spare figure, very excitable, and prone to dwell upon her own ailments and disabilities, consulted me in December, 1864, for chronic constipation; to palliate which, she had been in the habit of taking daily, a pill of extract nux vomica and aloes.
Under the use of sulphur200, followed by albumina200, she became able to dispense with her purgative pill, having a regular stool every day.
On the 20th February, 1865, she applied to me again with the following symptoms:
“The day before, her eyes began to smart and feel as though she had been exposed to wood-smoke. They felt full of dust; the conjunctiva of the globe was injected; there was a discharge of muco-purulent matter from the eyes this morning.
“Fluent coryza, the discharge being thin, not acrid, a sore spot, feeling raw, internally on the left side of the pharynx; these symptoms are aggravated by exposure to damp, cool air. Headache, a pressure backward in the entire frontal region; severe pain from the right side of the occiput to the right frontal protuberance.
“She feels ill, in an undefinable way; feels weak; half depressed in spirits, half apprehensive of some coming evil. Feels as though some unknown but irresistible influence had possession of her and she were about to be ill, or to meet with some misfortune.”
Her face was flushed, but there was no heat of skin; the pulse was about eighty, soft and slightly irregular.
Something, I cannot tell what, struck me as incongruous in the patient’s appearance and symptoms, and led me to doubt whether her condition were an idiopathic disease. I said to her, “You seem to me to be under the influence of some drug or poison. What have you taken?” She protested that she had taken no medicine. The similarity of her condition to my idea of the symptoms of Baptisia, came forcibly to my mind, and I asked, “Have you not taken or in some way used the tincture of the Baptisia?” After some hesitation, she replied: “I have been using for several days a hair-wash, composed chiefly of the tincture of Wild Ind.. Could that have anything to do with my symptoms?”
I forbade the hair-wash, and gave nitric acidb200.
A week passed before the symptoms disappeared, those of the eyes lingering longest.
NEW YORK, Dec. 1, 1867.
Dr. Dunham graduated from Columbia University with Honours in 1847. In 1850 he received M.D. degree at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York. While in Dublin, he received a dissecting wound that nearly killed him, but with the aid of homoeopathy he cured himself with Lachesis. He visited various homoeopathic hospitals in Europe and then went to Munster where he stayed with Dr. Boenninghausen and studied the methods of that great master. His works include 'Lectures on Materia Medica' and 'Homoeopathy - Science of Therapeutics'.