3. The nerves are greatly affected, there is almost always neurasthenia, and the once sweet woman becomes irritable and cross and miserable.
4. Spinal irritation is very common.
5. The uterus is the greatest sufferer of all: it has been cheated, and results the wrong done to it with terrible vigour: it becomes enlarged, hard and gristly, and is not infrequently the seat of tumours of various kinds. And no woman with such a womb is, or can be, other than miserable and discontented, and very frequently there is morning sickness analogous to that of pregnancy, with no end of other dyspeptic troubles.
The earlier in life the physical wrong is committed, the more pronounced are the ill effects. I do not preach at these sufferers, and I see very many of them, but I tell them plainly the price that has to be paid for their wrong-doing, viz., mental, moral, and physical deterioration and degradation.
Neither do I regard the thing from the standpoint of religion, though I have somewhere read, “Be fruitful, and multiply and replenish the earth.” This command may possibly be out-of-date, but this one thing I do know for very sure, that old Mother Nature wipes us all out without mercy when we disobey her laws: here, at any rate, the fittest survive.
If a married woman wants to grow old, ugly and miserable, the quickest and most certain way I know of is to practice the prevention here referred to.
A subject to be avoided? I do not think so; I have the deepest sympathy for suffering woman; my mother suffered for me, God bless her dear memory. Dixi et animam meam salvavi.
Now, why should we avoid this subject of the voluntary limitation of the family? “There is a time for everything,” a very wise man once wrote down for our instruction; here, in a medical work on Organ Diseases of Women, the fact that genesiac fraud causes a debased state of the whole genital sphere, with enlargements and displacements, its consideration is not only desirable but imperative.
In my judgment, a young woman who does not wish to bear a family should not get married at all. I know some goody-goody couples who are joined together, not in holy wedlock at all, but. like brother and sister.” Some of them teach in the Sunday School, and do what they are pleased to call “the work of the Lord,” particularly when it is taking the chair, or otherwise or elsewhere, but anyway always to the fore. Child-bearing and home duties are shirked by these un-wholesome by products of civilization. They have their reward: Nature wipes them out herself, and labels them for the ultimate sorting, “Depart from me, I know ye not.”
DISPLACEMENT OF WOMB FROM ACCIDENT: THE ORGAN TWISTED.
In dislocation of the uterus from accident the sufferings are frequently very severe indeed. Thus a married lady came under my observation on May 9, describing to me how eight years before she was touring in Switzerland, and had a fall which was followed by much bearing down and terrible pains across the hypogastrium. With this there was much irritation of the bladder. She suffered these horrors for three years before she could summon up courage to go to a doctor. Finally the pains drove her to an eminent London gynecologist of world-wide reputation.
This gentleman failing to even relieve her, she consulted a second physician, and he also failed, and considered she would never get well owing to the intricate nature of the complaint. The uterus and everything seemed as if they were being dragged out of her body. Homoeopathy she despised and ridiculed, and it was only after eight years of suffering that she overcame her prejudice and consulted me. In addition, besides the forenamed symptoms, there was a peculiar form of leucorrhoea coming on every four or five days “in little torrents of thick yellow discharge.” Secale cornutum 3x cured this case so rapidly and completely that the displacement must be regarded as having been most probably a twist of the parts.
There was no mechanical interference on my part whatever, and the cure proved permanent.
That Secale was homoeopathic to the case no competent person will deny, especially if he has ever seen the effects of a full dose of ergot on a parturient person, who has a strong back and plenty of muscle.
ENLARGEMENT OF BOTH OVARIES, ENLARGED UTERUS, APHONIA, RETENTION OF URINE, ETC. There are two or three points in some cases of women’s diseases that require to be thought out and worked out separately, or the sufferers enter the category of the uncured, and are orthodoxly labelled incurable.
What schoolmen cannot cure is incurable, that must be evident; what they do not know is not knowledge. A married lady, 26 years of age, mother of three children, was brought to me from distance on May 12, 1893,… “My cousin is just a wreck.”
Patient was of fine stature-what the French call large-of tender fibre, her tissues having large meshes. such people look much more healthy than they really are, and very common they are the product of a cross between a powerful individual and a consumptive one; the dash of consumptiveness is shown in their growth-largeness; they are large-celled and lacking in toughness. It was so in this case: her father died at 29, of phthisis; her mother is well and strong. Patient had measles twice; influenza twice; and had been three times vaccinated; and only last year had scarlatina. At her first confinement she was fearfully lacerated, and was subsequently sutured in five places. The case being very complicated, led us take it in sections from above downwards:-
1. Complete aphonia for some weeks, cannot produce any sound beyond a very slight indistinct whisper.
2. Left lobe of liver considerably enlarged and very tender.
3. Tongue mapped and very pippy; by mapped tongue I mean the so-called Lingua geographica.
4. Spleen moderately swelled.
5. Very constipated, and much pain in back and sides.
6. Pretty bad haemorrhoids.
7. The uterus is enlarged.
8. The right ovarian region is the seat of a tumid mass rather bigger than my fist; the left one also, which is very painful.
9. There is severe but intermittent leucorrhoea.
10. The period is too frequent and excessive.
11. And the crowning misery of this unfortunate lady was total inability to pass water for the past two months, being obliged to use the catheter.
12. Many nerve-symptoms more or less distressing; and as these seemed to be largely due to her overcome two attacks of influenza, I started my therapeutic campaign with Cypripedin 3x, 6 grains three times a day.
Cypripedium pubescens, Cypripedin, and Scutellaria lat., and Scutellarin, have long been my sheet-anchors in post- influenzal neuroses. This bettered the neurotic part of the aphonia, and also the constipation, and patient was altogether brighter in her nerve life. The spleen being swelled, and patient having at times some intermittent febrile movement, I followed with Urtica urens (gtt.xx. in die), and the more readily because of the retention of urine. This started a critical curative diarrhoea, under which the spleen became normal and the piles disappeared, and the aphonia lessened somewhat further. The retention of urine no better.
The retention of being due, at any rate in part, to a swelling of the circum-urethral tissue, which I have at times reduced with the aid of Saw palmetto 0, I gave this in 5-drop doses four times a day, but it did no particular good; and hence I studied the case somewhat further, and because patient woke up with the pain between 3 and 4 A.M., the tongue being mapped in the centre, I gave Mal. 30 in infrequent dose.
The mappiness of the tongue disappeared under Mal. 30, but the pips stood out very prominently, and she now stated that she was worse in the evening. This was June 9, 1893, and under July 3 I find this note:… “Has twice lost her voice; tongue very much furred of a morning; constipation quite gone; piles gone.”
Rx Arnica 1, 10 drops in water night morning.
August 14.-Voice quite well these four weeks; bowels normal; still inability to pass water, though the pain at the time of passing it is much less, the quantity more natural. Very severe leucorrhoea, causing great inconvenience. Insomnia.
Rx Medorrhinum 1000.
September 11.-Voice normal; sleeps better; the pain in the side still comes on in the night; very much troubled with the whites; still unable to pass water; left lobe of liver tender.
Ex Chelone glabra 0.
October 16.- No great change.
Rx Zincum acet. 0.
November 24.-Period scanty; anorexia; breathless; palpitation of the heart; still cannot pass water naturally.
Rx Hydrastinin. mur. 3x, 5 drops in water night and morning.
January 22, 1894.-“I have no pain in my side at all, ever; I pass water quite freely at times, but not always; piles and constipation very badly.”
Rx Sulphur 30 (infrequently).
March 2.-Piles and constipation cured; very bad white; micturition normal.
Rx Medorrhinum 1000.
This finished the cure. Patient remained well, and in November, 1894, had another baby, and there-after no trouble.
ENLARGEMENT OF WOMB; DROPSY OF LOWER EXTREMITIES.
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.