INTRODUCTION
(Night-blooming Cereus).
INFORMATION
This drug has been introduced in homoeopathic practice by Dr. Rubini, of Naples, Italy. We are sorry to say that, in spite of the high-sounding flourishes with which this new claimant to public favor has been announced, we are compelled to say that we have very little, if any, confidence in Dr. Rubini’s provings. These provings are of a piece with those of Mure, Petroz, Lippe and their compeers, vox et proeterea nihil.
According to Dr. Rubini, “Cactus has a specific action on the heart and its bloodvessels, dissipating their congestions and suppressing their irritations without weakening the nervous system like Aconite. Hence it is preferable to the latter in all cases of inflammation, particularly in all cases of lymphatic and nervous temperaments.”
What can we think of the provings and therapeutic statements of a writer who is so little acquainted with, and seems to have so little experience of the great virtues of Aconite as to declare that Aconite weakens the nervous system in inflammations which yield to its curative influence as their specific remedial agent. It is useless to waste an argument on such fallacies. And what shall we say of the extravagant cures which Cactus is said to have effected! Chronic bronchitis of many year’s standing, with rattling of mucus day and night, oppression of breathing on going up-stairs, and impossibility of lying horizontally in bed rapidly cured.
A number of pleurisies which are cured in from two to four days. Hepatization of the lungs resolved in a few days. Very severe peri-pneumonia cured in four days. Violent pneumorrhagia checked in a few hours. Pneumorrhagia every four, six, seven or eight hours, accompanied each time with convulsive cough, and expectoration of two or three pounds of blood, is at once relieved and ceases entirely in four days. Acute carditis, with slight cyanosis of the face, oppression of breathing, dry cough, pricking pain at the heart, impossibility of lying on the left side; pulse quick, throbbing, tense and hard cured in four days! Chronic carditis, with oedematous and cyanotic face, suffocating respiration, continued dull pain at the heart, hydro-pericardia, hydrothorax, ascites, oedema of the hands, legs and feet, impossibility of lying in bed, of speaking, or even of drinking, hands and feet cold, pulse intermitting cured in fifteen days! Rheumatic carditis, with much dry and convulsive cough, cured in four days! Without meaning any offense to the reporter of these miraculous cures, we are free to confess that we do not place the remotest confidence in the correctness of these statements. They seem to us to involve some unaccountable error in diagnosis. If there was peri-pneumonia, carditis and the like, they must have been totally different from what such diseases are in our climate. May not the Doctor have had hold of some luckless weight of a consumptive invalid, or two or three, upon whom he instituted his clinical observations; construing the symptoms at one time into chronic bronchitis, at another into peri-pneumonia, another into carditis, and so forth? Heart-disease has more than once been diagnosed in consumptive patients where not a trace of it was found after death. And what are not enthusiastic physicians prepared to assert when carried away by the worship of an idea?
The cases reported by other physicians and said to have been cured with Cactus, are not sufficiently decisive to establish the character of Cactus as a remedy for heart-affections in the same sense as we know Aconite, Digitalis, Arsenicum or Spigelia to be such remedies. Dr. Russell’s case is still under advisement. The case reported in the second volume, p. 159, of the Western Homoeopathic Observer, by E.P.D., may seem satisfactory at a first reading; but all that the Cactus did in this case was to relieve the fluttering in the stomach; this fluttering in the stomach has been relieved time and again by ourselves and other physicians by means of a few moderate doses of Aconite.
Dr. Duhring likewise reports a few cases. His first case, that of Mrs. C.M., is evidently a case of acute nervous irritation, where the attacks came on every night for seven nights in succession, until they finally ceased, not, as we believe, in consequence of the treatment that was pursued, but in consequence of the disease having run its course and reached its natural termination. The attacks left the patient debilitated, and the affected parts remained numb. The true remedy in this case was the Aconitum-napellus, of which we should have administered the first decimal attenuation of the tincture of the root, in the full expectation of not only seeing the patient relieved, but permanently cured after the first attack, without leaving her weak and numb, as was the case with this lady.
Dr. O’Brien’s case, in the Monthly Homoeopathic Review, May, 1866, is a good case, well told, and doing reasonable justice to the new drug, without disparaging the well-earned reputation of Aconite, Digitalis and kindred agents.
The sensation as if the heart was grasped with the hand which arrests the motion of that organ, is one of the most marked effects of large doses of Digitalis upon the heart. Any one who will take the trouble of reading the chapter on Digitalis in Hempel’s Materia Medica and Therapeutics, can satisfy his mind in regard to this fact. This symptom does not call for Cactus, but Digitalis. We refer the reader to Professor Purkinge’s beautiful experiments with Digitalis, reported on page 476 of the first volume of Hempel’s above-mentioned work.
