And then I Know that the grippe is coming, or whatever it may be. Personally, I think that temperature and weather have an enormous effect on our patients complaints, and on their complaining and those conditions help us select a remedy. I am not so sure when we prescriber Calcarea carb. six times in a morning but what it is a similar remedy, at least.
DR. T.G. SLOAN: In my Rockville practice, when I am in doubt about a remedy, I always give Sulphur and nine times out of ten it is the right remedy I dont know why but it has worked out that way for years.
DR. A. PULFORD: We find that certain cases will come in on certain days that require the same drug. We have tried to figure it out and have come to the conclusion that it is coincidental, rather than accidental. But we have found that it does happen quite frequently.
CHAIRMAN J.HUTCHINSON: My reading is rusty, but it seems to me that Hahnemann made a good many weather miasms. Didnt he?.
DR. A. PULFORD: He did.
DR. C.L. OLDS: That simply means dynamic influence, I suppose.
CHAIRMAN J.HUTCHINSON: Dynamic is a big word.
DR. H.A. ROBERTS: We are not prescribing irrationally when we prescriber the same remedy several times a day. Why is it in actual practice, that when we strike one case of appendicitis we will strike two or three within forty-eight hours? The same thing is true with pneumonia. You run into one case and you will get some more. Why should it also apply to the application of the remedies that are called for? They necessarily fall into the same channel because they are caused by the same atmospheric and climatic conditions.
DR. G. ROYAL: There are several reasons why I enjoyed this paper very much indeed. First, because it is the first time that I have ever listened to the writer read a paper; in fact that is the first time I have ever met him. I knew his father pretty well. The second reasons is because of the manner in which he grouped his symptoms, which was very good. The third reason and perhaps the least important is because it gave me a great deal of satisfaction. he uses the word diagnosis again and again. He uses the word neuritis, which is nothing more than pathology. He talks about haemorrhoids. That was very very satisfying to me because he was talking in a language which I under stood.
Here is what I think about diagnosis. A patient comes to you to make a diagnosis, which I say is essential to the selection of the remedy, that is, before you have taken your remedy. It is a part of the totality of symptoms, because to me it indicates the tissue that is affected and the manner in which that tissue is affected. Then I have that on which to build my grouping. This is what he has done in this paper and so I say I have enjoyed it very much.
DR. C.M. BOGER: Dr. Royal has opened up something here. It is quite the custom to deride diagnosis at some of our meetings, but all who do so should read Hahnemanns Preface to the Pathogenesis of Colocynth in the Materia Medica Pura, and see what he says there about the minor symptoms. I am not going to talk a whole lot about what he says there because you can read it yourself. But, he distinctly intimates that the minor symptoms must be in the picture. That bring up the other end of the subject and that is the thing that I discussed with Dr. Royal last night. We have in every proving the reaction of the system to the potency from the highest down to the lowest, and then the gradient all the way down to the lowest potency and down into the toxic effects. You will find that even in the chronic diseases.
You will find in acute diseases like pneumonia and typhoid, and so on, that the provings of the potencies exhibit the symptoms which come in as concomitants in acute disease. If you come down the scale to the mother tincture and then to poisoning effects you will find the toxic effects from the medicine and the toxaemia in the disease. Did you ever think of that?.
The toxaemia of the disease is the basis upon which the allopath makes his diagnosis mostly, not entirely.
He takes into consideration the toxic effect of the disease and from that draws his diagnosis.
So we should not deride these men too much who base their prescription on the toxic phase of the disease.
In taking with the doctor last night I asked what was the first indication which led us to prescribe Merc. cyan. in diphtheria. It was a toxic case, right here in the city of New York, where the patient died and a post mortem showed a membrane on the velum palati. That was the first thing that drew us to the use of cyanide of mercury. And we know now that that is one of our main remedies in diphtheria.
Take Arsenicum. The toxic symptoms of Arsenicum are the toxaemic symptoms which you see in diphtheria and typhoid fever, for instance. That is the way it is in every disease.
So that a knowledge of toxicological effects is quite helpful in finding the remedy, especially when you are up against a very acute disease. In other words, you must bring in everything. You cant limit yourselves to high or low potencies. If you take a high potency and make a toxicological effect it is purely coincidental and occurs only once in awhile, such as in the case Lippe pointed out–the thirst of Arsenicum. That symptom occurs frequently in toxic effect of Arsenicum, rarely from a potency.
DR. G. ROYAL: May I have just a second more? I know it is against the rules but I want to emphasize one point. Dr. Boger said if you give a high potency and get a toxicological symptom, that is purely coincidental. I want to say to you if you get a toxicological symptom and can find a remedy that has produced it, I am just as sure that you are going to get rid of that symptoms by giving it in the potency that produced it.
DR. C. M. BOGER: Sure, that is true.
DR. D. MACFARLAN: What I believe is important is to get reliable symptoms. When an ophthalmologist wants to operate on a case of cataract he injects homatropine sulphate and he gets a dilatation of the pupil. He gets it not once out of a hundred times but one hundred times out of a hundred. That is the beauty of making provings; you know what you are doing and you get it first-hand.
Then there is an intimacy between yourself and the man who makes the proving. I made a proving of China on a man once. In my relationship with him I talked him every day, while I was making this proving; he gave me an indelible proving as to what China would produce, which I never would have gotten from reading Hahnemann, because there is a personal touch in making the proving that you never can get otherwise.
And you prescribe so fast. Dr. Griggs makes provings. I used to work with him in the hospital. We would often prescribe for thirty-five cases in an hour or two.
I remember a case, for instance, that Dr. Griggs had, and the cure that he made. The case had been treated by an old homoeopathic doctor, a fine old fellow, but he only used three and four xs. He didnt believe in high potencies and hadnt made any provings.
The case was a child. It was a very bad skin case, the worst eczema I ever saw. He had a new color salve on about twice a week, but he was always sick. Dr. Griggs prescribed for it and in a month the child had a beautiful complexion.
That is the way you can get those results: from making provings. I dont see how anyone can practise homoeopathy unless he makes provings. My father had no confidence at all in anyone who didnt make provings.
DR. C.M. BOGER: As an addendum to what I said a little while ago I want to point this out: some months ago a neighbor of mine came to me after having been to many physicians with no relief at all. He had this symptom, an uneven contraction of the muscles of the abdomen. The abdomen was growing into little hillocks, as it were, all over.
The rest of the symptoms were rather nondescript. And on the strength of that symptom I gave him Plumbum, but I made a mistake.
In a short time he came back and said that he wasnt any better. In the meanwhile I had looked up his case a little more in my spare time-and it is a good practice when you have spare time to look up old cases that are not getting well -and I found that symptom as a toxicological symptom under Arsenic. I gave him a dose of Arsenic and now that man is getting well.
CHAIRMAN J. HUTCHINSON: We will return to AEsculus and I will ask Dr. Farrington to close.
DR. H. FARRINGTON: I want to thank you for your kindly remarks. Though you did not discuss Aesculus directly it is of no particular moment because I think the points that have been brought out are interesting and useful.
I want to especially thank Dr. Royal for what he has said because I think that many of his contentions are really true. We are perfectly justified in using a diagnosis in helping us select our remedies. All that we ask is this that we do not make it the principal thing unless it is (and that is a matter of individual judgment) because our provings have not been made on diagnosis and whatever we know about remedies that will cure certain diseases has been obtained only by clinical experience.
