**Veratrum album might properly be compared with Stramonium. Here the patient may be restless and wild looking, and be violent; but with this remedy there is much physical prostration indicated by the cold surface of body, cold sweat, blue rings under eyes, etc. **Veratrum may also be well indicated in melancholia; the patient sits brooding all the time, distrusts every one. In religious melancholia, where the patient prays a great deal, is anxious about recovery, and despairs of salvation, it also has a curative action. **Lilienthal says the Veratrum patient combines the wildest vagaries of the religious enthusiast, the amorous frenzies of the nymphomaniac and the exercative passions of the infuriated demon, each struggling for the ascendency, and causing him to writhe and struggle with his mental and physical agonies.
The following is a practical resume: **Aconite, ***fear. **Stramonium, ***terror. **Belladonna, ***violence. **Cantharides, ***madness. To this also add **Veratrum, **frenzy.
Aurum metallicum. [Aur]
Our great remedy for melancholia where there is an actual disgust for life, a longing for death and a tendency to suicide; this tendency is only mental, the patient rarely, yet sometimes, attempting it. Dr. Talcott believes that **Arsenicum oftener relieves suicidal tendencies than **Aurum.
**Arsenicum also relieves tendency to self mutilation found in such patients. There is feeling of worthlessness and despair; she thinks she has lost the affection of friends and that she is doomed to complete damnation. The memory is weak; anger or dispute makes the patient furious; there is a tendency to rush of blood to the head with these melancholic states.
**Argentum nitricum. Impulsive, always busy, errors in perception, dreads to pass a certain corner, makes mistakes as to distances.
**Glonoine. Well known streets seem strange.
Sulphur. [Sulph]
The typical **Sulphur patient is irritable, a chronic, constitutional grumbler or else a “ragged philosopher,” life having been a failure. Its usefulness in mental conditions is extensive and it corresponds closely to religious mania or melancholia; he becomes most anxious about his own salvation, but different to that of others, an egotistic condition often seen in our asylums and sometime out of them. These patients will dress themselves up in rags and imagine that they are clad in gorgeous attire; they will wear paper crowns with the majesty of a king, prince or potentate.
**Sulphur also has a forgetfulness and patients will stop a long time to think how words are spelled.
**Aconite being an acute **Sulphur is most useful in mania and melancholia where there is a nervous excitement, fear of death, predicting the day thereof., and restlessness due to mental anxiety. It is particularly useful in sudden, and acute cases, which are worse in the evening. The patients are tortured by fears; afraid of darkness, ghosts. Convulsions of paresis may suggest **Aconite.
**Pulsatilla. Religious melancholia, despair of salvation, constant prayer, folds the hands sits like a statue; sleepless, restless and changeable mania.
Anacardium orientale. [Anac]
A most valuable remedy in mental disease, and its guiding characteristic is the well-known sensation of having two wills, one urging him on to do what the other forbids. It is a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde remedy. Another characteristic is the irritability of the patient, with an irresistible desire to swear and curse; this is not from a low moral or religious education, but from mental disease, usually a chronic mania.
**Anacardium has loss of memory, a condition for which the drug was used long before Homoeopathy established its scientific basis; again, the patient will imagine that he hears voices afar off talking to him, or he has a fixed idea that he is possessed of a devil, that he is double, or a woman will fancy that her child is not her own.
**Nitric acid. With this remedy there is a disposition to swear, the patient often imagining that she has a devil within her, that her mind and body are separate, or that her child is not her own. This remedy has also inclination to commit suicide by shooting.
**Anacardium is a remedy much used in low melancholic conditions, and its clinical record is a brilliant one. It is an excellent palliative in the dementia of old age. Butler sums up as follows: **Antimonium crudum, peevish; **Chamomilla, cross; **Belladonna, pugilistic; **Nux vomica, ugly; **Anacardium, cussed. In chronic manias it is more often curative than any other remedy.
Professor of Materia Medica in the University of Michigan Homeopathic Medical College. Member of American Institute of Homeopathy. In addition to his editoral work he authored or collaborated on: Boericke and Dewey's Twelve Tissue Remedies, Essentials of Homeopathic Materia Medica, Essentials of Homeopathic Therapeutics and Practical Homeopathic Therapeutics.