In the course of our friendship with our remedies, as with our acquaintances, we learn their qualities and who can be depended on for charm, for fun, and to do the work of the world. I would like to introduce to you anew, today, the coterie of intellectual remedies.
It would be difficult to select from any thousand people the couple of dozen noted for their qualities of mind, so I must beg your clemency for the fragmentary group that I would present to you today. They were selected, not with an eye to numbers, but from two viewpoints, first the practical clinical one, on the basis of patients showing unusual mental ability whose symptomatology had called for these remedies, and secondly from a theoretical standpoint by running through the mental pathogenesis of our frequently used remedies. By mere haphazard I found 25 remedies which I should pout preeminently in this class and I want to give you just a high light on their mental processes.
We seem fated to always begin with Aconite, like Genesis, it is the beginning, and like the nature of the remedy what can be said of its intellect is strong and swift: Brainy people, full of power and vigor, with a plethora of ideas, sudden in decision, swift and accurate in carrying out, hypersensitive: yes, but in a robust way, capable of ecstasy and even of clairvoyance, but not in an effete form, subject to fears and anguish, strong as their natures, and, strangely enough, with a dash of malice which in them is a spice rather than a habit.
Argentum nitricum is next. This may surprise you for we associate silver with failure of the intellect but in this remedy there is an intellect to fail. This is the prototype of public performers, lecturers, flatulent mentally as well as physically, folk full of drive, hurried by the pressure of work and public contacts. They become apprehensive, fidgety, full of fear and anxiety, and, as they urge themselves to more and more effort to compensate for their failing confidence, strange conduct crops out and they are nimble at devising queer reasons and excuses for their erratic mental processes, to use modern parlance, they rationalize par excellence.
Belladonna, so well known to us, has been intellectual from its childhood, these vigorous, plump, large headed boys with a high I. Q. Here again the force shows itself in sudden violent complaints, the mind is so active and fertile that the irritation of illness drives it quickly into the realm of delirium and violence. Unexpected acts crop up which in normalcy are piquant and refreshing and in mania may appear as biting, physical violence, boisterousness and destructiveness.
Next we come to one of the very few remedies who carry on the worlds work in this country and make America what it is. We are speaking, of course, of our business man, Bryonia. Rich and competent though he is, he fears poverty, he may be slow on the uptake but how persistent, he can follow through with large projects, his obstinacy is an aid, his choleric disposition an added strength. The Bryonias are not negative, they are a bursting people which their pains symbolize. They are better under pressure, in mind as in body. They are a mighty folk and can produce real end results in the world.
Many of you will disagree with me about our next type, Calc. phos. To be sure, he is a slow starter, but he makes up for it. He begins with the trifling weakness of Calcarea but he develops some of the brilliance of Phosphorus and in the end he approaches the mental range of Tuberculinum.
Intellectually and insanity are relatives. Consider the beautific state of Cannabis indica, its grandiose ideas, its wonderful theories, the thrilling prolificness of its mind, its enthusiasm, to a point of exaltation and clairvoyance.
Coffea, as we can almost all demonstrate, is a great worker. Its power to think and to debate are heightened, it has a supersanity, its memory is phenomenal, it will quote you appositely from the poetry of any period. It labors incessantly for some great cause and then breaks down with insomnia thinking of a thousand things in bed. Hypersensitive to noise, to joy, to the pain of its neuralgias.
You may not think of Fluoric acid as intellectual, for in a way it is the gigolo of remedies, the male Sepia. But consider it in the trilogy of Silica, Pulsatilla, Fluoric acid. It is business, mad, hungry for thought as well as for emotion, with a curious mildness like Pulsatilla, and a reticence commendable in one so emotional.
On Ignatia we need barely touch. You will know its over educated refinement, too much cherished in mind and body, fed on Chopin instead of porridge but capable in its changeable way of great things in the arts.
Consider the mental veracity of Iodine, the typical thyroid, zealous, restless, often literary, feeling that if it stopped its active brain it would go mad, at the same time over careful, exigent, impulsive, a great driver of itself even more than of others.
Kali carb. has a more complicated and intriguing mentality, witty, whimsical, sensitive to changes of mental atmosphere also, a ticklish proposition in spirit as in body, impossible on committees because of its touchiness, trying in the family, quarreling with its bread and butter but ingenious, and vastly capable.
Its relative Kali phos. whom we usually meet in nervous prostration before prolonged sorrow drove it into indifference and sadness, was an interesting type, its competence shot with unexpected cruelty, contrariness, and passions.
You have all suffered from the uplifters, the compensatory social workers who need Lachesis. Like Josephus in the Goop book,they never finish anything, but what they do begin! Brilliant in comprehension, always a lap ahead, their loquaciousness a form of alleviating discharge, self conscious, conceited, jealous of prominence, what promotors they are. A brilliant group who must fight to the end succumbing to their own temperaments.
What would the profession of the law or indeed the teaching ranks do without Lycopodium? Here the mind from the word go has been developed at the expense of the body, incompetence, dread of new or even of familiar roles, infinite procrastination coming from this sphere, indecision, misanthropy, the imperiousness of weakness, the personification of the inferiority complex, or as one of my patients put it of mental impotence.
Nitric acid, with its deep lines of suffering, its sensitiveness, its vindictiveness and taciturnity, shows you its mental calibre less than the others but it is there beneath the obstinacy, beneath the physical sufferings, a vivid brain.
Natrum phos. has the solidity of Natrum mur. with some of the scope of Phosphorus, abundant ideas but easily distractible, hurried, angry at trifles, discouraged, fretful.
Phosphorus, at its best, has perhaps more brains than any remedy. It is over active, vehement and suffers from its own vehemence, excessive throughout, with a disorderly strength, it has the element of immodesty, a sort of mental exhibitionism which makes all its traits both good and bad show up to their full value. It also has ecstasies and clairvoyance although these are of a more tenuous and Celtic type than those of Aconite.
Train and restrain Phosphorus and it will go to any heights.
Another of the builders of our modern civilization is Nux vomica, the certified public accountant, charged with detail of which he is perfect master but which irritate him into fault finding, vehemence and even spite. He must have an outlet from his sedentary and exacting occupation, he cannot bear reading or conversation, he takes to dissipation or lets out in spells of touchiness, he will kick the chair and rip off the button from irritable weakness, he has too many irons in the fire and they are always hot, he is hurried by a thousand details until he is tortured and takes it out on the family. His mental peristalsis is reversed, he is full of perversity, he strains not only to vomit, to stools and to urination but to forcing things his own way. He suffers and makes all about him suffer form mental tenesmus.
Staphisagria we think of in other spheres but he is one of the cultivated gentlemen of the earth, controlling himself at any price, brooding over his chagrin, soured by his pent up wrath, to the point where he has to let the bank handle his business because repression has fatigued him until he can no longer cope with it.
Of the exasperating prowess of Sulphur we need hardly speak, the scholar, the book worm, the inventor, the great unwashed, ill shaven, thread bare, with spotty vest, with smooched collar, his room full of papers and books, his closet full of boxes, his mind full of metaphysics. The first time you meet him he is a genius, the next time a nuisance, and subsequently a pest.
Silica with its neat, clean, orderly mind, with its firm yet delicate perceptions, has a mental fibre of which we need more, if only he had the confidence and the personality to impose his thought on the community.
Tuberculinum, the traveler, the great cosmopolite, ever in search of new people, new excitement, new ideas, the faddist, the consumer of cults.
