VASCULAR SYSTEM.
Heart and Arteries, Pulse frequent, soft, and weak, the beat being sometimes so feeble as to be almost imperceptible. Pulse 100, feeble, and regular. Pulse feeble, 120, and intermitting after every second stroke. Pulse 90 and of fair strength. Heart’s action almost imperceptible. Pulse small and 140. Pulse 40. Pulse often intermitting and feeble. Pulse scarcely perceptible. Sensation as if all the blood in his veins frozen. Pulse scarcely to be felt; when it become more perceptible it was still intermitting and irregular; at times two or three beats followed each other quickly, and then were succeeded by an intermission. Pulse quick and irregular. Pulse slow and intermitting. Heart flabby and containing but little fluid blood. Pulse so small and weak that it can scarcely be felt. Coldness and pulselessness of the
limbs, and feeble beating of the heart; when the pulse became fuller it was only 58 and intermitted every fourth beat gradually it rose to 70 and finally to 100, the skin becoming hot and dry. Pulse irregular and slow; pulse 54 unequal and soft as if the blood did not fill the arteries. Heart almost empty. No pulse to be felt in radial or temporal arteries; afterwards it rose to 125. Both venous and arterial blood very fluid. Some fluid and a great deal of coagulated blood in right side of heart; ventricles and auricles filled with black coagulated blood.
Test asserts that, “If Aconite could be given in the very commencement, before the disease has had time to develop a local inflammation, this localization might be prevented in many cases; but I believe, likewise, that when the local inflammation has already acquired a certain degree of intensity, many other drugs may, by virtue of constitutional idiosyncrasies, or with respects to the organ which has has be come the local focus of the disease, be preferable to Aconite, which, in such cases, could not be administered without involving a precious loss of time. As general it seems to me that, even in acute inflammations,
Aconite is only indicated when the inflammatory fever is the ruling symptom.
CLINICAL REMARKS In disease of the heart, particularly in those in which the chief indication is to diminish the action of that organ, Flaming found Aconite a most valuable remedy. In functional derangement it will often effect a cure. In simple hypertrophy, pain and increase action is more purely sedative and more uniform. But, in a very large class of cases of disease of the heart, when
instruction exists, which prevents the heart from transmitting the necessary quantity of blood by the usual number of pulsations, and it is forced to make up for such inadequacy by more frequent and forcible contractions, the use of Aconite Digitalis, and similar remedies is highly injurious.
VENOUS SYSTEM
It is homoeopathic to intense or excessive venous congestion of many organs, with entire paralysis, or depotentization of all the arterial activities, carried up o the point of absolute cyanosis. If the vital force of the patient are great enough to react against the Aconite, of course quite opposite symptoms will arise, viz., acute pains in various parts, and more or less active febrile excitement, which rarely, however, proceeds to the extent of causing true inflammation. When it does seem to cause inflammation, it is not a pure, frank, and decisive inflammation; even Dr. Veith Meyer is obliged to admit that, “We have as yet no irrefragable proofs that this drug can produce any thing farther than the congestion state; there are as yet no instances, not even in cases of poisoning, not in the later and most industrious proving of our Vienna colleagues, in which the introduction of it into the healthy organism has resulted in the appearance of any one of the products peculiar to inflammation, viz., an exudation.” It may occasionally cause an effusion, but never a true inflammatory exudation of plastic lymph, fibrine or pus. ‘Even in the post-mortem examinations of those poisoned by Aconite, so far as now known, as well as in the experiments upon animals, no positive and decisive indications have been observed that nay true inflammatory product has ever followed the administration of Aconite.” Hence Aconite cannot cure a fully developed inflammation, but can only subdue that congestive state which precedes inflammation, before perfect inflammatory stasis and exudation have set in; in other words, it can cut an inflammations short before it is fully developed, but it cannot cure it when it is; this is confirmed at the bedside. In inflammation this remedy never fails to exert its beneficent and quieting power over the fever which accompanied the inflammation, and even over some of the inflammatory symptoms themselves, still, should the disease have gone a stage beyond the stadium congestivum, we often find ourselves obliged to abandon our Aconite, or at least only to rely upon it as a fellow-worker with other drugs more homoeopathic to the existing disease.
Pereyra (not Pereira) says, “we observe no genuine traces of inflammation in the bodies of those who have fallen victims to this poison-he insist that the mere circumstance of patches here and there of vascular fullness (which even Noack and Trinks admit to be seated especially in the veins) along the alimentary canal, does not prove that inflammation is present-for this appearance is observed in almost all cases where life is extinguished from the action of sedative agents,” and Opium, it is well known, causes flushed countenance, full pulse, but does not excite inflammation, but venous congestion. – J.C.P.
Vogt says, except the over-filling of the great vessels with (venous) blood, we find but few traces of affection of the intestinal canal, in poisoning with Aconite, of the kind which the acria cause. He adds that violent poisoning with it is characterized especially by the excessive predominance of venosity, great congestion, and accumulation of (venous) blood in the head, chest, liver, and whole abdomen – it seems evident that, if the veins be so full, the arteries must be comparatively empty. – J.C.P.
The bilious symptoms which Aconite is apt to cause, also speak for its primary action upon the venous system. This is a great stumbling-block to those who assume that it acts primarily and excitingly upon the arterial system. Veith Meyer says: “There is one morbid condition of the economy which, in the present position of our science, is not easily reconciled with what we (Veith Meyer) have laid down as the general sphere of activity of this drug; I (V.M.) have assumed that its field of operation is solely in the ganglionic nervous system, that it affects only the vaso-motor nerves which excite or sustain the arterial activity.” Biliousness, jaundice, and congestion of the liver are vastly different affections from arterial congestion, true and arterial inflammation.
Look for a moment at the following symptoms of Aconite, and see if they do not present a perfect picture of-
Jaundice.
Dark-yellow skin. Yellowness of the sclerotica. Loss of appetite. Disgust for meat. Bitter taste in the mouth. Bitter taste in the mouth, with want of appetite. Pains in the chest and under the short ribs. malaise after eating. Eructations with sourish taste. Vomiturition. Vomiting of green bile. Vomiting of a greenish watery fluid. Vomiting of mucus. Pressing pain in the stomach, as if from a weight. Violent colic-pains. Pressing pains, as from a weight in the hypochondria. Colic, with inflation of the abdomen, relieved by the discharge of wind. Pressure in the hepatic region, by which the respiration is embarrassed (apparently from an increase of bulk in the organ), then aching in the umbilical region. Squeezing pain in the region of the gall-bladder, when sitting, embarrassing the respiration. Flatulence. White evacuations. White evacuations and red urine. Thin, rather watery evacuations, with some colic, grumbling in the abdomen, and faint feeling. Constipation for several days. The urine passed in the early morning is brown, becomes cloudy after a time, and deposits a sediment. Nights in the highest degree restless, sleepless, and full of dreams. Fearful, vexatious dreams. Head confused and vacant in the morning after waking. Pain all over, as if beaten. Unusual weariness. Constant itching and biting in different spots on the skin, obliging him to scratch. Slow pulse. PUlse unequally full, soft.
You will not easily find, in any of the text-books on pathology, a clearer description of icterus than this detail of symptoms brings before you. According to the assumption of the primary venous, and passive congestion action of Aconite, we would expect exactly such effects upon the liver and biliary functions. It also seems homoeopathic to abdominal dropsy from disease of the liver and omentum.
LYMPHATIC SYSTEM.
Storck and Greding assume that Aconite does not act as prominently upon the glandular system as Conium, yet they both report cases of glandular swelling and tumors which resisted the action of Conium and yielded to that of Aconite.
