PURGING OR PHYSIC NUT-CUBAN PHYSIC NUT-BARBADOZ NUT.
Introduction
(Jatropha-iarpos, iatros, a physician; rown, trophe, substance of food.)
Hering first proved the seeds of this plant for us, the various names given to it describing its action and the localities where it is found. Much of the commercial croton oil is made from the jatropha seeds.
Allen says that Jatropha is “an extremely valuable and too little used remedy for profuse, gushing (59), watery diarrhoea, sometimes associated with coldness of the body and unquenchable thirst, at times with vomiting of large amounts of albuminous looking substance.”.
Symptoms
Associated with the diarrhoea of Jatropha we have, as one of the chief characteristics, rumbling and gurgling in the abdomen (11). This gurgling is loud and is as if a full bottle were being emptied within the abdomen, and as soon as the gurgling stops, or when the bottle is seemingly emptied, there is a call for stool. The sphincter at this time, according to personal experience, is under good control and usually the patient can wait for a second call before he answers.
(In Thuja there is gurgling that is likened to water coming out of a bung-hole, but it is noticed at the anus during the expulsion of the stool and not in the abdomen, as under Jatropha.)
Jatropha has been found of value in the “first stage of cholera (31), before the period of collapse” (Hering), with cramps in the calves (71).
I use Jatropha 3d.
KALI SALTS.
The potash salts are tissue drugs in the widest sense of the term; some of them “ate very complex,” says Allen, “producing profound and diverse alterations of both function and nutrition” and the potashes, as a class, are more poisonous than any of the other alkalies.
“There are certain family resemblances between all the members of this alkali tribe tribe recognized by all students of pharmacology; features which grouped together make up the `alkali cachexia,'” but in this, as in all families, we will find the different members to have certain characteristics or distinctive features which will enable us to tell them apart and prevent our mistaking the one for the other.
“Our friends of the physiological school seeking to exhibit an alkali, take little thought as to which alkali to select; an alkaline water is ordered too frequently in a very careless fashion; these waters contain alkalies in great variety and it often seems that the water showing the largest amounts of alkaline salts is preferred, and is taken in unlimited quantities, with no thought of their influence on digestion or on the blood or tissues. As a rule they are devilish in their effects, insidious and disorganizing, profound tissue changes resulting often, quite out of proportion to the amount taken.
“I am of the opinion that more chronic disease, predisposing to most pernicious and incurable maladies, is produced by the almost universal habit of drinking alkaline waters than by any other of the numerous habits of the civilized world. These pernicious results may be noticed among the effects of all the alkalies; we find them in all states and stages in alkaline toxicology but they are most prominent and most profound in the salts of potash.
“These potash salts as a class produce a profound anaemia, increasing all secretions, especially the quantity of urine, while, at the same time, the elimination of the solid constituents, especially uric acid and urea, is increased (193); the sufferer becomes emaciated as well as anaemic; the kidneys after a time become inflamed and degenerate; digestion becomes impaired early, for an alkaline stomach does not favor the assimilation of food; the patients are always tired and cold. In violent poisoning, headache, vertigo, and even convulsions follow. In more chronic cases, the mucous membranes are affected by all the potash salts, the secretions varying in respect to amount and character; catarrh in universal.
“But perhaps the most important and serious lesion produced by these salts is the paralysis of the heart. It seems that their action is chiefly on the motor-centres in the heart muscle. All victims of potash poisoning suffer from cardiac depression but not from respiratory failure; these salts do not affect the pneumogastric nerve as they do most other motor nerves. Emaciation, excessive waste in the excretions, anaemia, a low, feeble pulse, with threatening cardiac failure are thus seen to be essential features of the potash disease.
“A negative point of great value is the absence of fever. I would have you never forget that only in the most exceptional cases can any potash salt be indicated when there is fever; they are applicable only in a condition of weakness, soft pulse, coldness, general depression, never excitement; certainly not febrile excitement” (Trans. Am. Inst. Hom.,’94).
Ringer, quoting from some experiments made, says: “Potash salts are all far more poisonous than soda salts. Soda salts, in twice or three times the quantity which proves fatal in the case of the potash salt, produce no effect on the system, except a passing weakness.” All the potash salts “lessen the frequency and force of the heart’s beats, and sometimes make them irregular. Large doses at once arrest the action of the heart, which always ceases to act in the diastole” (114).
In studying the symptomatology of the various potash salts, which we will now take up, especial attention must be paid to the character of the secretions from the mucous membranes, to the character of the pains and to the period of aggravation.
