(Atropa Belladonna)
(The freshly expressed juice of the whole plant at the commencement of its flowering, mixed with equal parts of alcohol.)
The plant gathered in the garden (on a rather dry soil and preferably on the slope of a hill) is little if at all inferior in medicinal power to the wild plant, although some physicians have asserted the contrary.
From the following completed list of the symptoms of belladonna it will readily be seen that it corresponds in similarity to a number of morbid states not infrequently met with in life, and that hence it must frequently be homoeopathically applicable for curative purposes, like a polychrest.
Those small-souled persons who cry out against its poisonous character must let a number of patients die for want of belladonna, and their hackneyed phrase, that we have well-tried mild remedies for these diseases, only serves to prove their ignorance, for no medicine can be a substitute for another.
To take an example, how often are the worst forms of sore-throat (especially those combined with external swelling) given over to death, in spite of all their employment of venesection, leeches, blisters, gargles, emollient poultices, cooling powders, sudorifics and purgatives. And yet, without all these tortures, they might have been cured in a few hours with a single minute dose of belladonna.
And what other real medicine would not be hurtful, dangerous, and poisonous in the hands of the ignorant? Certainly every powerful medicine would be so if given in unsuitable cases of disease and in disproportionately large doses-for, which the so-called physician would be solely to blame. On the other hand, the most potent and energetic medicines will become the mildest by diminishing the dose sufficiently, and they will become the most curative, even for the most delicate and sensitive bodies, when they ate given in appropriate smallest possible doses, and when the case of disease consists of affections very similar to what the medicine itself has shown it can call forth in healthy human beings. With such potent drugs as belladonna, we must never neglect to exercise the requisite carp in the homoeopathic selection. But this would never enter the head of the routine practitioner who, as is well known, is in the habit of treating all cases with a few prescriptions learned by rote.
Taught by a hundredfold experience at the sick bed during the last eight or ten years, I could not help descending to the decillion-fold dilution, and I find the smallest portion of a drop(As the dose is one globule the size of a poppy seed (300 of which weigh only a grain), moistened with it, we give less than 1/1000 th of a drop of the fold medicinal dilution spiritualized (potentized) by succession, for with a single drop many more than 1000 such small globules can be moistened.) of this for a dose quite sufficient to fulfil every curative intention attainable with this medicine.
Two drops of the juice mixed with equal parts of alcohol, taken as unity (as with other vegetable juices), and shaken with’ 99 to 100 drops of alcohol by two downward strokes of the arm (whose hand holds the mixing phial) gives a hundredfold potentized dilution; one drop of this shaken in the same way with another 100 drops of fresh alcohol gives the ten-thousand fold dilution, and one drop of this shaken with 100 drops of alcohol, the millionfold. And thus in thirty such phials the potentized dilution is brought to the decillion-fold, with which the homoeopathic physician effects the cures he can expect to make with belladonna.
(The above is the method to be employed for the dilution and potentization of the other vegetable juices.)
Belladonna, in the small dose just described, is, if the case is homoeopathically adapted, capable of curing the most acute diseases (in which it acts with a rapidity proportionate to the nature of, the disorder). On the other hand, it is not less serviceable in the most chronic ailments, in which its duration of action, even in the smallest dose, amounts to three weeks and more.( The best preventive of hydrophobia is the smallest dose of belladonna, given at cry every third or fourth day, and repeated at ever longer intervals.)
Almost all authors have asserted that vinegar is an antidote to belladonna, but that is a mere conjecture, copied: in simple faith by one from another, and yet nothing is further from the truth. Repeated experience has taught me that vinegar only aggravates the ill-effects of large doses of belladonna.. (STAPF also observed that in the violent headache from belladonna vinegar laid on the forehead increased it to such an intolerable degree that it had to be taken off.)
Hahnemann's three major publications chart the development of homeopathy. In the Organon of Medicine, we see the fundamentals laid out. Materia Medica Pura records the exact symptoms of the remedy provings. In his book, The Chronic Diseases, Their Peculiar Nature and Their Homoeopathic Cure, he showed us how natural diseases become chronic in nature when suppressed by improper treatment.