Two months of the Bacillinum C. quite cured him and he was really a different man, and his friends hardly knew him without his cough so frequently had it been to the fore.
INCIPIENT GENERAL ATROPHY.
A boy of ten years of age was brought to me by his mother at the beginning of the year 1891 for wasting weakness. Rather tall for his age, he presented the following picture: a glum, ancient face, thin, almost cheekless, hollow eyes, neck long, thin, studded with “waxen kernels,” i.e., peripheral hypertrophic glands, thorax almost like a skeleton, and its cutaneous covering very full of wee veins; abdomen thin and yet pot-like, the so-called drum- belly; extremities long and thin; groins full of feelably indurated very small glands. He is mum always, gives no replies to my enquiries and his mother tells me he will hardly ever talk; he takes no interest in strangers or in general surroundings, and seemingly has no very special desire for anything or anybody, and hardly ever wants either to eat or drink, “And yet,” exclaimed his mother, “he is not ill!”
Five months under our Bacillinum C. and C C. (in infrequent dose I will here again reiterate) with an intercurrent month under Thuja 30 and followed by another month under Calcarea phos. 3x and now he is bright, chatty, nearly a stone heavier, enjoys his food and is full of interest for his surroundings; the old shrivelled-up joylessness has gone and given place to cheerful thrivingness.
I ordered no alteration either in diet or place of abode; the boy lived before the treatment, and during the treatment and now after the cure, in the same house in a London suburb.
CASE OF HYDROCEPHALISM OF TWENTY YEARS’ STANDING.
A gentleman forty-six years of age came to see me in the month of November, 1890, for pains at the back of the left side of his head that had worried him for over twenty years. He complained also of a pain in his right foot. His tongue coated, frothy and quivery. Deep-brown eyes. Although married he gets at times nocturnal emissions. His pains are worse in the evening, no pains on awaking. He tells me he has been subject to pains in his head (Bacillinum produced severe long-lasting headaches in the writer) all his life and that he had water on the brain as a child. His mother died at 73 of carcinoma ventriculi. He is depressed.
He had the Bacillinum C., altogether thirty globules spread over a month and twice repeated, and then reported his pains as cured, and his spirits much brighter. I saw him six months later, and thus know he continues well. “I have been in splendid health and well up to my work all summer,” said he the other day.
CEPHALIC SUFFERING IN LATER LIFE PRIMARILY DUE TO OUT- GROWN HYDROCEPHALUS.
This part of my subject may be regarded as new, and deserves more than a passing consideration. In the first edition of this work I narrated a case in point. (Case XXIII). Let us enter upon the subject somewhat.
We have all met with cases of oddly-shaped more or less piled-up or bulging-out heads, and these people really bear about with them a cephalic misshapenness (perhaps very trifling, but still peculiar) as the permanent expression of the hydrocephalic states of their early lives. Such people are frequently gifted, their children are very delicate and apt to die of consumption; and although they have grown out of their hydrocephalus and may be gifted and distinguished members of society, they generally suffer more or less in various ways; they are apt to be a bit peculiar in their sexual spheres and their ways–glum sort of folks, by no means excelling in amiability. I know one gentleman whose skull is drawn up somewhat sugar-loaf fashion or rather as if the skull had developed while it was hung up by its top; his periodical haemorrhoidal bleedings indicate, I think, a tubercular taint.
I will further explain what I am trying to express by narrating a case in point which has been all the more instructive to me because he was a faithful patient before I knew anything about the virtues of Bacillinum. He first came under my observation in the year 1880 in some distress of mind because he was childless; I found the urethra gleety and this I thought was the anatomical cause of his wife’s barrenness. He had a course of treatment from me to cure this sticky urethritis, and got in succession Thuja occidentalis 3x, Hepar sul. 3x, Natrum sul. 4, and Cynosbati 0.
These therapeutic measures were followed by his wife getting in the family way, and patient thereupon ceased attendance. There were three or four points in the case at the time that struck me, viz., the peculiar bulging state of his skull, certain brown patches on the skin and head suffering, and finally his frequent nocturnal emissions notwithstanding the fact that he was happily married. I did not see him again for nearly ten years, when on January 30, 1890, he again put in an appearance and complained of insomnia, headaches, and the fact that he still suffered pretty severely from nocturnal emissions, worse after the exercise of the marital function.
The peculiarity of his insomnia was that he awoke in the very early morning and could not get off again. I have before explained that this symptom is characteristic of Bellis perennis, and as this drug is an excellent restorative from sexual fag I ordered it him, five drops of the matrix tincture night and morning. His own estimate of the prescription was: “I have never had such a good tonic in my life.”
By this time I had read this gentleman’s constitution in the light of my later experience, and regarded his head and other symptoms as what I for convenience sake will call “hydrocephalism.” His hearing troubled him a good deal; the aurists called it “internal congestion,” but his hearing did not improve under their treatment; he suffered from great depression and life-long constipation and his nocturnal emissions added very much to his irritable melancholy. Here I gave him Bacillinum C. and thereafter C.C. altogether during about two months.
And the result? For the first time in his life his bowels acted normally, his hearing greatly improved, and, unless both he and I were and are mistaken, his head altered in shape quite perceptibly. So it seemed to us, but this seeming change in shape may have been due to his changed expression from a kind of sour glumness to one of smiling brightness. I may add that the patient knows nothing of my theories or of what remedies he had.
A year has since passed and the great change wrought in him still holds good–this I know because he had his daughter under my care.
PELVIC CONSUMPTIVENESS.
Consumptiveness may show itself not merely in the lungs, in the glands, but also in the brain; we have cited enough examples of all these manifestations of the tubercular diathesis. But it shows itself, perhaps almost as frequently, in the pelvic region; as disturbances of the menstrual or sexual functions: in young men as more or less furious incoercible nocturnal emissions, masturbations, or excesses in venery, that if not cured run the sufferer to ground. The excessive fecundity of the tuberculously disposed needs no dwelling upon.
The girls develop very quickly and ripen perhaps unduly in the bust. Such a case came under my care very early in the year 1889. She had profuse and too frequent periods for long though she was then but twenty years of age. In bust, large; in colour, white, waxen almost amyloid. Her breathing very distressing and debility profound. Her father has spinal curvature, and a little brother has died of tubercular meningitis.
I regarded the dyspnoea as from the anaemia; the anaemia as from the excessive monthly losses and want of appetite, and the menorrhagia as from a consumptive state of the pelvic organs. Two months of Bacillinum C. cured the pelvic consumptiveness, the period becoming natural, whereupon the anaemia and dyspnoea began to mend in equal pace; the remaining painfulness of the menstruation disappeared under Thuja 30, and patient was well. With some difficulty I got her to take Hydrastis Canadensis 0, five drops in water night and morning, for a month, and the subsequent two years of capital health testify to the soundness of the curative work then done.
I have before pointed out my fondness for Hydrastis in small material doses as an after-cure to the bacillinic treatment. Here I gave it for a month, but at times I give it for two, and I some times use it intercurrently between two courses of Bacillinum with much advantage, not that it has any relationship to tuberculosis as such, but it increases the appetite, and patients under its influence put on flesh of good quality.
HEPATIZATION OF LEFT LUNG.
A gentleman of sixty years of age consulted me on October 13, 1888, for a cough, consolidation of left lung and albuminuria; the vocal resonance of the left lung is very pronounced; pains in the back, dreadful perspirations. There was a curious point as to the colour of the hair on his hirsute body: that on the chest exactly down to the diaphragm is white; below the diaphragm his body-hair is black.
Burnett was one of the first to speak about vaccination triggering illness. This was discussed in his book, Vaccinosis, published in 1884. He introduced the remedy Bacillinum. He authored twenty books, including the much loved "Fifty Reason for Being a Homeopath." He was the editor of The Homoeopathic World.