Dr. OVERMAN, in reply, thanked the Chairman for his kind words and said that he was very glad the members had been able to understand him and to give him new ideas. He thanked Dr. Foubister for mentioning his cases in India and Assam. He had some experience of typhoid and malaria, but the speaker did not think he had so many acute cases in the hills. It was same experience he had with chronic cases of malaria, one had many, but there was no time to experiment with the acute cases.
Dr. Cooke had many interesting points to make. The synthesis of the orthodox school and the homoeopathic school showed the way they must go in Homoeopathy. It must be made understandable to other physicians not accustomed to homoeopathic ideas. He had heard that there would be students present who would afterwards be going to the tropics so he prepared his lecture in a more practical way. Perhaps it would be possible to cure many of the diseases not due to mankind homoeopathically.
Homoeopaths had the feeling when they saw the cases coming out of allopathic hands that they must not use penicillin for pneumonia. The fever was going in three days, but the patient was in bed for three weeks, six weeks, sometimes after three months he was still not very well. He thought many lives could be saved in this way but when there was a well-defined picture of a homoeopathic drug one could do more with it than with an antibiotic. He had tried to put forward a mode of action wherein antibiotics were not needed.
When he said that one must not give an indicated remedy, that was not quite correct; one came to a remedy, looked in the Materia Medica and one found under Sulphur over-protected cases of pneumonia”. and one thought, “this is the first day, perhaps it will be right in the last days of the pneumonia”. There were many good Homoeopaths who had met that experience.
One must give the indicated drug but in coming to drugs which were not common for that special infection one felt that it was not the ordinary course of the vital forces of the normal body acting against that special infection, therefore he would say that in that case one did better to give the complimentary medicine and not the indicated drug as it was not known as being the drug for the ordinary case of pneumonia.
Dr. Cooke spoke of sulphaguanidine. He had tried it and liked it more than injections of serum of bacillary dysentery but as with other sulpha preparations it was always a long time before the patient fully recovered. The patient came, one made the diagnosis and he had the sulphaguanidine in his pocket, he had bought it and the doctor knew he would take it, so he told him to take one day and come back the next. One did these little tricks to try to treat the patients homoeopathically. He would like to have a big homoeopathic hospital in the tropics and then homoeopaths could speak in the same way as other physicians.
Dr. Benjamin spoke of the differentiation and said that there were diseases not due to mankind which gave other symptoms. He knew that. As Dr. MacNeill said, the differentiation was that a special part of the body reacted in all patients in the same way so that it was a complete picture of a disease. Sometimes it was easy, but with malaria he had not found a medicine which would cover its special symptoms. With malaria and with most of these infections there were very useful differences in the subjective symptoms, the sweats and chills came in the morning, the afternoon, or the evening and this enabled one to try different remedies.
One had to be very swift and the patient must be intelligent enough to understand he had to have two, three, four or five goes of fever before it finally disappeared. A good medicine for one case of malaria did not help the next case but when the whole condition of the patient was better one could be sure that one had the right medicine. One had to have courage when the whole family was standing there, say ten persons, round the bed!
With regard to the remark if the differentiation was possibly easier made as protozoan for the infections not due to mankind and bacterial for the infections due to mankind, he could not accept that differentiation. Sure there are many protozoan, but also bacterial infections among the infections not due to mankind. The differentiation has also a deeper sense. All infections due to mankind are connected with bacteria living as normal parasites in the healthy body, so this body has the time and the chance in forming a short of immunization against these germs, before the specific disease develops.
Whereas with the infections not due to mankind, these protozoas and bacteria are not found in the healthy body, so when there takes place an infection by the sting of a gnat or a flea, there is something like the explosion of an atom bomb. The body does not find the good reaction against the invasion, because there was no opportunity to immunize. The body was not accustomed to these kinds of germs.
