DR.PLUMB BROWN: I resolved not to take part in any discussion this year, but asthma is close to my heart. My father and asthma from the time he was a young man until he was sixty- five, when he was taken. I have spent a great many hours working over him and trying to keep the life in him until the old family doctor got there, in the country. Dr.Underhill gives some valuable suggestions. I have had some very marked results, in chronic cases, with Homarus.
DR.W.W.WILSON: I remember a woman who came to me with a bad hear condition. Her son brought her to me one evening by automobile and succeeded in getting her into my house. I gave her a dose of Mephitis. She said she had never and anything in her life that worked the way that did.
Dr. Ironsides of Camden, New Jersey, when talking in one of our state society meetings, asked me if I had been hit by a skunk. He said he had been. He said, “I know all the symptomatology of Mephitis, with all the asthmas in the world, the paralysis of the whole respiratory tract practically. It is the most awful thing I ever experienced.” He had been hit by a skunk.
DR.C.L.OLDS: Another remedy that has not been mentioned but which has had considerable success in asthmatic attacks is Blatta orientalis. I think we have very little proving of it, but it has been used in India with a good deal of success in asthmatic cases. I cases. I have tried it a few times and once or twice with very good success. I dont know any particular indication for it.
DR. C.M.BOGER: In treating a case of asthma, two factors need to be taken into consideration-the spasm and the character of the heart. We so frequently see certain factors that are productive of the attack, such as over-eating and various other things. I have seen very good results with get away with this treatment. One gets away with the morphine habit, and after a while the adrenalin does not act. The patient isnt cured. He gets another attack.
You have to remember a little about the quality of asthma. Asthma is a cardio-vascular spasm. It has that element in it, and some other things easily found. But in order to find the patients constitutional remedy, it is my habit to go back over the whole life period of the patient from birth down to the present day. Dr. Roberts does not think so, but I have had a few experiences with it.
I do not want to find fault with Dr.Underhills prescribing at all. There is only one thing I believe he didnt try in the constitutional remedy. He has a Nux vomica patient. Pneumonia came on and he did not give him Nux vomica but Phosphorus. If he had stepped up his remedy from where he stopped, up to 1005th, and then to 1010th, if necessary, he could have controlled that pneumonia. I would have tried the Nux first. I know patients do not die as quickly with homoeopathic treatment as they would like to make you believe.
We should remember in pneumonia to find the remedy for the patient and not the disease, Phosphorus is high acting. Not every patient is a Phosphorus patient. Dont understand that I am criticizing his treatment. There still would have been time to give the Phosphorus if the Nux failed.
DR. E. UNDERHILL, JR.: May i ask a question here? Which would be the better to do, in the presence of Phosphorus symptoms, to give the Nux first and then give the Phosphorus, or to give the Phosphorus first and then the Nux?.
DR. C.M.BOGER: I would give the Nux first, step your Nux up, as I said.
DR. E. UNDERHILL, JR.: In the presence of the Phosphorus?.
DR. C.M. BOGER: That brings up the very point I did not mention. You may give a remedy and the patient may come back in two or three days with a totally different appearance. The unthinking homoeopath jumps, like a hare before a rattlesnake, and gives a different remedy and spoils the whole case. That is where it pays to hang on to the original remedy, because those symptoms that come up in that short time, the Phosphorus symptoms, are simply an alternation of the original action.
DR. C.L.OLDS: Even after a long period?.
DR. C.M.BOGER: That period is hard to determine sometimes. It requires close watching. But those symptoms are just alterations of our original Nux symptoms. If you let them subside, and if you are not too excited and in too big a hurry about the pneumonia, and repeat your Nux, you will be all right. Is that right, Dr.Hayes?.
DR. E.E.S. HAYES: I believe so.
DR. H.A.ROBERTS: Especially the early history, and in fact everything pertaining to the patient himself, should be considered, and then the case carefully analyzed. I do not think that I said I would not go into the history of it. I have treated a great many cases with asthma. In fact, I think if there is any one class of diseases that come to me from all over the country, it is asthma, because I have been particularly successful with them.
I say again that if a remedy is indicated, that is the remedy, whether or not there has been a previous treatment of Nux vomica or Sulphur. I do not see why you should the Nux vomica unless there are more indications for it.
DR. J.M.GREEN: A few weeks ago. I had a case of very severe asthma come to me. The patient had been taking adrenalin but the attacks continued. She wanted to know what homoeopathy could do. I had a talk with her, and told her if we could get for off her adrenalin, we might be able to do something. She was willing to try and said if I would come to see her in the next attack, she would try to steer clear of taking the drug. She was a fine, healthy specimen of middle aged womanhood and had a fine character. In watching her in the next asthmatic attack she seemed to have more nervous symptoms than she had asthmatic symptoms.
The more I watched her,the more it seemed to me she was either a drug woman or a hysterical,complex person, rather than a person who was suffering terribly from asthma. Finally she gave up and said she could not stand it any longer, she would have to do something else. So the took her adrenalin, and sent me word the have to do something else. So she took her adrenalin, and sent me word the next day, after she got over her attack and was sufficiently built up from it she would come back and try to take the homoeopathic treatment. In the meantime, attacks came on, one after another, and she kept taking adrenalin, and sent for a doctor who gave her morphine, and the next thing we knew she was dead at ten oclock one night from taking apparently an overdose of morphine. What a pity!.
CHAIRMAN D.T. PULFORD: Before asking Dr.Underhill to close, I would like to mention some cases we had in Toledo. We had a factory there were they had a lot of dust from castor beans. As long as this dust was in the air, there were they had a lot f dust from castor beans. As long as this dust was in the air, there were a good many cases of asthma. In one case, a peculiar thing happened. After the asthma there developed a desiccation of the skin, particularly of his hands. His wife would get a saucepan full of this dust-desiccated skin almost every morning, and after he was free from the dust, the asthma cleared up.
DR.B.C.WOODBURY: I did not have the good fortune to hear the paper, but I would like to give one point I discovered about asthma recently, a new remedy. It will be one of the remedies. It is not a specific. I suppose most of you have had asthmatic cases aggravated by the presence of animals, especially horses. I had recently a patient who could not go where a cat had been without having an attack of asthma. I treated him quite a while and got him so he would not have asthma unless he came in contact with a place where a cat had been. That opened up a new field. I went out and go three cats and cut some of the hair, and sent it to Ehrhart & Karl who potentized it up to the 10, 000th potency. And we have a new remedy. He has had no more attacks of asthma since taking the remedy three months, and he has been where cats were. The remedy is Felix capillaris.
DR. E. UNDERHILL, JR.: Is that strictly a homoeopathic prescription?.
DR. B.C.WOODBURY: No, I think it only removes the susceptibility. The constitutional remedies will be needed to clear that case.
DR.E. UNDERHILL, JR.: In closing there are one or two points that I want to bring up. The question of pneumonia. I had very little experience with pneumonia in the old days, and I lost the cases right and left. Since I have been practising homoeopathy I have lost only three cases since I began in 1917, and in a number of cases I was not able, for some reason or another, to be sure of the similimum and let the cases drift along. I am not afraid of pneumonial patients now.
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.