And there again you have got one of the Arsenicum contradictions; in these congestive headaches they want their heads as cool as possible. The child may be feeling rotten, its body may be cold and sweaty and damp, the child feeling horribly sick, it is restless, frightened, wants to be fairly well covered, and yet wants its head cold, cold clothes, Eau de Cologne applications, something of that sort to keep it cool.
Well, there is one other point I ought to have mentioned, and that is in connection with their diarrhoeas. Practically always in the Arsenicum diarrhoea you will get an offensive stool.
Well, i think, that sketches the typical nervy child.
“What is their colour ?”
They are usually a variable colour, they tend to be rather pale but they flush on excitement.
“And they sallow ?”
No, they are not swallow. It is rather a fine skin and when flushed like that they very often get hot heads and cold hands and feet on excitement or over-exertion.
“Is it useful in skin conditions ?”
It is less valuable than I would have expected. I think it is very valuable in some of the more chronic skin conditions rather than in the acute dermatitis. If you picture the secondary syphilitic eruption, that is the kind of condition in which you find Arsenicum indicated. But I have not seen it of much use in the acute dermatitis. That may be a purely personal experience; but I find it far more useful in the more chronic, rather than the acute skins. And I must say, watching some of the skin cases here who have had Arsenicum in various salts I dont think the results have been very good in the skin department certainly not in the acute conditions.
Where you have alternation of asthma and skins, there you will have very definite Arsenicum indication there you have a chronic thing. And where you have asthma and diarrhoea alternating, there I have seen it useful. And i have seen a case of recurring headache, and asthma developed which cleared on Arsenicum. Arsenicum does very definitely have these alternations, but that you are more liable to meet with in the adults than in child.
Well, if you take that as a starting point of the highly strung, nervous child, you can particularly repeat the symptoms out of the Materia Medica and label them all CHAMOMILLA. I mean as I read through the symptoms of Chamomilla you wouldnt know whether it was Arsenicum or Chamomilla; and yet they are entirely different drugs, and entirely different children. If you saw my notes here, I have almost exactly the same notes under Arsenicum as Chamomilla. The first thing I have is hyperaesthesia, over- sensitiveness to noise, pain, people; you have exactly the same hyperaesthesia in Chamomilla.
I have the note of restlessness under Arsenicum, moving from one person to another, never still. You have exactly the same in Chamomilla, it goes from one person to another, never still, never at peace. And yet you have only got to see the two children and they are as different as night from day. In Chamomilla you have got the most incredible hyperaesthesia, the Chamomilla pains are more intense probably than any other pains that patients suffer from; but the reaction is entirely different.
In Chamomilla you get an absolute frenzy of rage; they resent it; they resent having it; and they are perfectly furious that you havent cleared it off at once. You are doing your best for a Chamomilla child and it is liable to strike you because it is hyperaesthetic.
The intense restlessness of the Chamomilla child, going from one person to another; each time it is dissatisfied with the person it goes to and as it leaves them it is quite liable to strike at them. It is quite different from the Arsenicum soothing that the child gets from each one. The Chamomilla child who is over sensitive to noise, you dont get the nightmare the following night, you get the child wrought up into a perfect frenzy, liable to scream and stamp when disturbed. You see their reaction is quite different.
Then, in the Arsenicum case you have got the child who is restless, always moving about. In the Chamomilla you have a child who is better from motion, but particularly better for being carried about is is passive motion. You start to jog an Arsenicum child about and you will probably terrify it. You start jogging a Chamomilla child about and it will probably stop its yelling and begin to crow. You stop and it wants you to go on; and if you dont do it it will pull your hair. You see, the reactions are entirely different, although the symptoms stuck down on paper are almost the same.
Then the Chamomilla kid is never still, it is never satisfied with anything it is doing. But it isnt a question of passing from one occupation to another; it is a question of getting tired of one thing and throwing it away. It never puts away its toy in a cupboard, it just chucks it down. It picks up something else, and if you tell it to put the first toy in the cupboard it is liable to yell.
The other thing about the Chamomilla kids which is pretty constant is that they very definitely tend to get more excitable as the day goes on, more more irritable, more difficult to manage; and they are liable to be particularly troublesome about nine oclock in the evening. Very often you get a story that the Chamomilla child is perfectly impossible after it is put to bed till about midnight, then it appears to wear itself out and falls off to sleep.
Then, you know that Chamomilla is practically universal for the teething child, but i think it is a mistake to give Chamomilla to any teething child, the indications for it are so awfully definite. And where you have a teething child who needs Chamomilla the child tends to get much more fractious at night, it tends to have very swollen, inflamed, tender gums, and they to be one-sided with a marked flush on that side of the face.
The tender gums are made much worse by any application of heat; they are very much better from cold applications. They are liable to be very much worse in a hot room, and, as I say the attack is liable to subside about midnight. It is worth while remembering that the toothache pains of Chamomilla have entirely different modalities from the other pains.
Chamomilla kids are awfully liable to get attacks of acute colic. I think mostly they get attacks of acute colic because they are given in to by their parents; they see something that they want and scream until they get it, and that evening they come down with acute abdominal colic mostly the fault of the parents. And with these attacks of the colic you always get a lot of wind in the Chamomilla children, and these attacks of colic are very much relieved by hot applications.
And with their attacks of colic they are very liable to get bouts of diarrhoea, with the typical green Chamomilla diarrhoeic stool. If you ever come across a Chamomilla child with a colic and diarrhoea you get the best illustration of Chamomilla irritability; they fairly yell the place down. Of course it does hurt, it is pretty acute colic, but there is no doubt about the childs being in pain, in fact the neighbours will probably know as much about it as you do.
Then there is: another contrast with the Arsenicum children, and that is the Chamomilla children are usually hot-blooded, very liable to have very hot heads, very often hot and sweaty and they are very liable to have burning hot feet and stick them out of bed at night.
There is one difficulty in dealing with the Chamomilla children. They are ungoverned children, and they have mostly been allowed to get out of hand; but the Chamomilla child in a tantrum of temper can go on to such a stage that it gets blue in the face and starts convulsions from pure rage. So do be a little careful about the handling of the true Chamomilla child.
I remember seeing one, she was about three years of age, and was a typical Chamomilla child. In a rage she was liable to beat her head against the wall, merely because it distressed her mother. And I saw that child one night about ten oclock and she had been just perfectly impossible for the last hour, and her mother had left her to scream, and she had gone into a convulsion. When I saw her she was practically unconscious, dusky in the face, and twitching all over. So do be a little careful about the wholesome neglect of the Chamomilla child once it has got into the Chamomilla stage.
And I have seen quite a number of Chamomilla babies who were teething, with acutely inflamed gums, who did develop convulsions. So evidently you have got an explosive nervous system in the Chamomilla child, and you have to be a little chary about letting it go too fair.
“What potency do you give to a teething child ?”
Teething children do quite well on low potency. A few doses usually stops all the disturbances, 12 or 30, two hourly, in the average case. But where you have a violent attack, give possibly every half-hour until they quiet down.
There is one other condition for which you commonly need Chamomilla, and that is the acute otitis in children. It is a frightfully painful condition, and in most of these acute otitis cases the child doesnt want to be touched, and it is intensely irritable, very often yells with the pain; and if you get a history that has been brought on from exposure to cold, I think Chamomilla is one of your greatest standbys in the small child, particularly if you have got the one-sided flush with it.
He wrote a number of books: Children's Types, Digestive Drugs, Pneumonias
Douglas Borland died November 29, 1960.