HAWTHORN BERRIES. (Crataegus-kpaTaiyos, krataigos, a kind of flowering thorn; Oxyacantha-oXus, oxus, sharp, akantha, a spine.).
Symptoms
Crataegus, which has been lauded as a heart remedy, had a proving under the direction of Dr. Cowperthwaite, of Chicago, who reported the result to the American Institute of Homoeopathy, in 1900. Fourteen provers took part, one taking repeated doses ranging from 5 to 185 drops of the tincture, and Dr. Cowperthwaite reports that the only action of the drug, common to nearly all the provers, was a purgative one. One of the doctors who assisted in the work and followed up the action of the drug on the provers. reported the “this much-vaunted cardiac remedy, after thorough test physiologically on the healthy, and as a therapeutic measure in a large number of cardiac lesions, has shown such a limited sphere of action as to be entirely superseded by other drugs.”
“Therapeutically,” he goes on to say,”Crataegus has no beneficial action in valvular lesions. It is indicated by a slow, low-tension pulse, a general circulatory torpidity, tendency to cutaneous chilliness and blueness of the finger tips, without organic heart lesion” (Dr. G. L. Brown.)
Only two of those who took part in the discussion reported as having used it in valvular lesions and both times successfully.
I have used the remedy but once, and in the tincture, and after other remedies had failed. It was a case of dilation of the heart, due to chronic interstitial nephritis, and accompanied by great dyspnoea and much cyanosis. It relieved.
