Thus at the beginning of the current year a city merchant, fifty-five years of age, came to consult me for a cough, with a bronchial catarrh. The tawniness of his skin was very marked, and this he attributed to a twenty years’ residence in Africa. The cough was habitual, and worse in the evening. There are a good many crescentic cutaneous efflorescences on his chest.
Two months of Hydrastis Canadensis p. He took altogether just an ounce, in small material doses. Cured the cough; reduced the catarrh of the bronchial lining to a minimum; and very materially lessened the tawniness of his skin; many of his friends remarking upon the very striking improvement in his seemingly dirty complexion. I should have followed up with some three or four other anti-icterics, but the gentleman considered he was well enough, and would not come any more, even “please his wife.”
THE COMPLEXION OF THE SKIN IN RELATION TO LIVER AFFECTIONS.
That the complexion is more or less modified in certain affections of the liver is pretty patent to all the world, and the least observant readily remarks that “So-and-so’s liver cannot be right.” Nevertheless, when people’s skins are in an unhealthy state they commonly treat the skin, or go to a skin doctor who is pretty sure to regard his speciality as the first, and treats the skin, generally d’ en face, with washes and ointments and the like.
I have tried to combat this view in my “Diseases of the Skin from the Organismic Standpoint,” but, I am afraid, with too little success.
The skin gets its life from within from the blood, and it is from within that a good complexion must be obtained. One cannot make an unhealthy skin healthy by any washes or ointments whatsoever.
I have preached this doctrine before and oft, but few will listen, and hence I am going to preach it again, so that I may at least be able to say dixi et animam meam salvavi.
Take a person whose skin is jaundiced. Does anyone propose to wash the yellow skin white?
And if not, why not? It were almost as rational as to try to get a good complexion from any powders and washes whatsoever and yet the deluded apply such things daily in faith believing.
LARGE VARICOSE VEIN; ENLARGEMENT OF LIVER
It might be wondered, at, that I should give a case of varicosis in a work devoted to the main diseases of the liver, but, as a matter of fact, the case is so unique that I add it here lest it be lost, and because I hardly know where it would fit in better.
At the beginning of 1889, a young lady was brought to me by her mother for a large varicose vein running from her right shoulder, over the right clavicle, and across the upper half of the right side of the chest. It varied in size somewhat, and at its largest was about the size of an ordinary quill.
Being great society people this vein cast quite a shadow over their lives, it being “quite impossible, you know, to dress.
” One sees the oddest things in the way of varicose veins in the lower half of the body, but not very often in the upper, as gravitation is enough to empty them when they are higher up.
All kinds of treatment had been applied, or applied to, and quite lately the vein had been treated by that wonderful cure- nothing-electricity.
I reasoned thus: Veins that dilate in that manner, steadily, slowly, increasingly, must do so from an obstruction in their progression heartwards, just as the little rivulets higher up the stream must fill up when the stream is dammed up lower down.
From a rather careful physical survey of the parts involved, I found the liver very large-indeed huge, which was probably accounted for by the fact that patient had thrice had ague, or else three attacks of the same. Her skin was dirty dingy-looking, and the portion covering the lower end of the breast bone studded with wee flat warts, and the degree of anaemia was considerable. Moreover, she had a disagreeable cough, and her sleep was not good.
An ounce of Chelidonium p., spread over eleven weeks, restored the liver to its normal size, and the varicosis had almost entirely disappeared, so that patient had again taken to evening dress- respectively, undress. Her skin at the same time became clearer, and her blood of evidently better quality.
CASE OF GALLSTONES.
The wife of a well-known clergyman came under my observation on the 12th of June, 1889, for gall-stones. Competent medical men had attended her in these attacks, and had diagnosed gallstones. Patient had turned fifty, and is the mother of many children. Her attacks began with sharp agonizing pains in the pit of the stomach, extending to the arms, and with them severe vomiting; her breath is very short; her bowels are costive, and she is a martyr to flatulent dyspepsia.
Being a rich woman, she had sought the best advice in London, but to no avail. Her physicians had stated that nothing more could be done. Her lower extremities had begun to swell, and this, coupled with a loss of flesh, dyspnoea, and a very darkly icteric coloration of the skin, seemed to corroborate the given prognosis, and the more so as patient’s able physicians had long tried their best with such remedies as are current in the orthodox school of medicine.
But knowing well their poverty in remedies, and in knowledge of remedies, I set about treating this lady precisely as if she had never had any medical treatment at all.
Thirteen months later, while I am actually writing these notes, she is plump, healthy looking, and touring with her husband in Scotland, and she has had no pains at all for just eleven months. Friends who have not seen her for some time barely able to recognize her because of her changed appearance.
Her remedies were Hydrastis Canadensis, Bryonia alba, Thuja occident, Helonium, Strophanthus, and intercurrently, for far- reaching constitutional effects, two common nosodes in high dilutions.
The change in this lady’s disposition is rather remarkable, as from being dull, taciturn, unengaging, and almost socially uncivil, she has become bright, affable and chatty. The fact is, our brightness and chatty sunniness in our social life do verily depend much upon the liver.
Cholesterinum IN TUMOURS OF LIVER.
This is obtained from gall; I believe from that of the bullock. I learned its use of the late Dr. Ameke, of Berlin, author of the “History of Homoeopathy,” translated into English by (alas, also the late) Dr. Alfred Drysdale, sometime of Cannes.
Ameke claimed to have derived much advantage from its use in cancer of the liver. This is a weighty statement, and is true. I believe I have twice cured cancer of the liver with it; and in obstinate hepatic engorgements that, by reason of their obstinacy, make one thing interrogatively of cancer, the effects of Cholesterine are very satisfactory; at times even striking.
I commonly use the 3x trit. in six-grain doses three times a day, but this will here and there act very violently, and when this happened I have found the third centesimal trituration effective.
Sometimes one meets with cases in which there appears to be a semi-malignant affection, involving the left lobe of the liver, and what lies between it and the pylorus and the pancreas, and here Cholesterine 3x and Iodoformum 3x, in four hourly alternation, have several times rendered me sound service.
I may relate one such. Summoned 60 miles into the country late one afternoon, to a supposedly dying lady of 60 odd years of age, I found her icteric, vomiting, bathed in cold perspiration, very thin, debile; the pulse small and weak, and patient seemingly almost moribund. Nothing would stay on the stomach. The seat of the affection was the left lobe of the liver, extending to the left and towards the navel. That there were gallstones is probable, but, quite outside of the acute attack, there was a chronic affection of some kind in the region just named, evidenced by swelling and tenderness.
Kali bich. 5 relieved; Cholesterine 3x and Iodof.3x cured in a month, and, the case being of long standing, the cure converted several families to the contemned pathy of Samuel Hahnemann.
But, allowing for all doubtfulness and vagueness in what I here relate, Cholesterine is my sheet anchor in organic liver disease in which the commoner hepatics-Chelid, Carduus, Myrica, Kali bich., Mercurius, and Diplotaxis tenuifolia have failed.
I do not think that Chlosterine has any influence upon the “disposition: to cancer, but it acts by reason of its elective affinity for the seat of the disease; it effects therefore not a cure in the Hunterian sense, in as much as it only gets rid of the product of the disease, but that is something, as there is then a temporary cure, which under favorable circumstances may become permanent proof of which permanence of curative results I will presently adduce. In this case the cure has proved to be permanent, as now (two years since the lady is in capital health, and on a visit to her daughter in the North of England.
CURING THE INCURABLE-THE
INSOLENCE OF IGNORANCE.
“Le cancer est incurable parcequ’ on ne le guerit pas ordinairement; on ne peut le guerir puisqu’ il est incurable, donc quand on le guerit c’ est qu’il n’ existait pas.”-Duparcque.
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.