DR.KAVCIC: I am sure that Hahnemann would have known that psora is at the bottom of tuberculosis if this really were true, because tuberculosis does not attack a healthy man. A man who sickens with tuberculosis must have some constitutional weakness. Only so will he contract tuberculosis. Very often you will find tuberculosis and no psora, but you will also very often find psora and no tuberculosis. Perhaps this will be much closer to the truth than everything else.
DR.BOGER: Psora and itch were usually considered the same thing until Baggenhouse exploded the idea and said that the after effects of itch was only a psoric susceptibility. Now about tuberculosis, there are two starting things that came to my notice. I talked this subject over a great deal with the late lamented Dr. Patch. One day I said to him, “Dr. Patch, do you think that a tuberculosis in the body is ever destroyed”? He said, “No, the patient never shakes it off”. I said, “What makes you think so”? “Well”, he said, “my father-in-law, who was raised near Lynchburg, Virginia, had tubercular haemorrhages when he was a young man. His lungs healed up, but in his old age somewhere in the eighties he developed an obscure brain trouble. We were not able to diagnose it and he died. We did a post- mortem on him, and found tubercular nodules in the lungs”.
I am very much of the same opinion, that no case of tuberculosis ever eliminates the germ. True, it may become quiescent, but it is never eliminated. A recent occurrence in my practice bears me out very strongly in this respect. A young woman who belongs to the “poor white trash” class, that is the very lowest type, came into the office one day and said, “Doctor, look at that wrist.
All the doctors tell me that I have rheumatism and there is no use of taking any medicine; that in six weeks I will get well without any medicine. I cant stand the pain”. I looked at it and said, “What do they say that is”? “It is rheumatism”. I said, “Have you a cough”? “Yes, I have a cough”. “Do you have night sweats”? “Yes, I have night sweats”. “How is your appetite”? “I cant eat”. “What kind of pain do you have in that wrist”? “I feel all the time as if water were slowly running through my wrist”. The wrist had a peculiar oval look of tuberculosis of the joint.
I gave her one single dose of Tuberculinum and in five days you could see all the ligaments in the wrist. There was ankylosis there. The pain all left. She rested well. Her appetite came back, and the cough stopped in about ten days. A month or two after that a friend of hers was in office and I asked what had become of her. She has gone to the City Hospital to have that wrist broken over again. Can you imagine any man who considers himself a physician breaking that wrist open again? That is the kind of a person who tries to tell homoeopaths what to do.
DR.FARRINGTON: The doctor says that a tuberculosis is never dissipated. I presume he means that the remains of it are never dissipated. It can become innoculous by being encapsuled, and also by being calcified. No doubt every one of you has had the experience of giving medicine to a patient and having him cough up what he thought were little pieces of bone, or of having enlarged glands suppurate and discharge pieces of calcareous matter.
Just this last spring a patient of mine died in convulsions. He was a young man of 34 and had never been sick a day in his lifetime. He never knew what it was to be tired, but four years previously he began to have spasms. They started in the tongue, involved the organs of speech and swallowing, and finally the right arm. For four years he was treated with luminal.
I took him off the luminal and he immediately began to have the grand mal-major convulsions. The trouble always started, though, in the tongue. He had aphasia and was unable to speak before and after the spasms. It seemed to me there was trouble in the speech area on the left side. I called an eminent specialist and he confirmed this. He said that an operation was the only thing that would save that young man. He operated, but it was operated too late. He found a tumor an inch and a quarter in diameter in this area with a calcareous center.
DR.WOODBURY: Doesnt the fact that the X-ray films show tuberculosis deposits in the chest around the hilus of the lung bear out the idea that the tuberculosis is there, but, as Dr.Farrington suggests, it becomes encapsulated? The calcareous element prevails and that is where the danger comes in in using remedies such as Sulphur and Silica in tuberculosis.
DR.ALLEN: Last winter my son at Bucknell was sick and I had considerable conference with the anatomist. He said he was surprised to know the number of encapsulated tubercular glands that had been there for years.
DR.UNDERHILL, JR.,: Mr. Chairman, Dr.Farr brought up the question of Bacillinum. I haven to had any experience with Bacillinum. I guess chiefly because I havent happened to have the remedy.
Spigelia in another remedy that has, I believe, an aggravation from sunrise to sunset, especially in neuralgic pains involving the face.
AEthusa cynapium in infants that are fed every time they cry, draws up the knees when carried, in the same general position that the Medorrhinum assumes, but AEthusa patients do not sleep in the knee-chest posture, as far as I know. I came across one eighteen-year-old girl who slept in the knee-chest posture and for whom Medorrhinum was the indicated remedy. This is the only time in an adult that I have found this particular symptom. It interested me so much that I asked her why she slept in that position. she said at times she had a feeling in the abdomen as if there were ten thousand worms twisting ….. around in there and when she took the knee-chest position, the feeling immediately ceased.
As to the cure of asthmatic cases, I have observed cases of asthma cured by Medorrhinum. Dr.Waffensmith spoke of Tuberculinum used for euthanasia. I think almost any homoeopathic remedy, if it absolutely fits the case, is able to act as a curative when the disease is curable, or as palliative in fatal cases. It will also fearfully aggravate cases which have developed considerable pathology but are just on the borderline of curability.
Vitamin deficiency is not only a cause of subsequent conditions, but also a result of a constitutional state or perhaps of dietetic imbalance.
In regard to what Hahnemann might have possibly meant by psora, as far as I recall he did not go very far into the question of inherited syphilis or sycosis. Does anyone know whether this is true or not? Possibly what is understood in his writings as psora may be due to inherited syphilis or sycosis or a combination of them from perhaps one, two or more generations back.
The knowledge of the characteristic symptoms of medicines is indispensable if we wish to be successful in the practice of homoeopathy, because it is one of our fundamental practical rules, that the characteristic symptoms of the only truly curative remedy must correspond with the characteristic symptoms of the patient. This, as one of the most important rules of our school, enters also largely into the study of the materia medica, and for this reason we must deprecate the arrangements of medicines according to groups of pathological conditions sought after and supposed to exist in groups of symptoms recorded in the provings.
Before we seek the characteristic symptoms of the remedy, we must deprecate the arrangements of medicines according to groups of pathological conditions sought after and supposed to exist in groups of symptoms recorded in the provings. Before we seek the characteristic symptoms of the remedy, we must possess the characteristic symptoms of the patient, or what is falsely termed the disease.
The truly characteristic symptoms of the patient exist exclusively outside of the pathological groups of symptoms of the discerned disease; nay more, they are symptoms which never necessarily belong to the disease or any form of it, but which appear absolutely accidental. The symptoms present and necessarily constituting and belonging to the disease, we may term essential symptoms; characteristic, we term those symptoms which are found on the diseased individual besides the essential symptoms, either on account of his constitution or from other accidental and unaccountable causes. If it is so, and if the experiment has established this rule to be correct, we would gain nothing by classifying the provings of our medicines in such a manner as to press them into pathological livery.-AD.LIPPE, 1865.
Eugene passed away at his country home on Spring Hill, Tuscarora Township, Bradford County, PA. He had been in ill health for several months. His wife, the former Caroline Davis, whom he had married in Philadelphia in 1910, had passed away in 1961. They spent most of their marriage lives in Swarthmore, PA.
Dr. Underhill was a member of the United Lodge of Theosophy, a member of the Philadelphia County Medical Society, and the Pennsylvania Medical Society. He was also the editor of the Homœopathic Recorder.