While talking with his wife she said to me, ” It is a funny thing about Johns hiccoughs. They follow the moon.” She brought out the almanacs covering those three years and with one exception that man had hiccoughed constantly day and night for two weeks and then had had a two weeks intermission. At that time he went without hiccoughs for sixteen days and only had twelve days of hiccoughs. In the Repertory under “moon is waning”, I found but one remedy which I sent down the next morning. Four hours later the man stopped hiccoughing. Three days after that it returned and lasted for about two hours. In two weeks I gave him more Dulcamara. An old conjunctivitis returned. He asked for Hepar and I gave it to him.
I always regretted that I did because I am satisfied now that he didnt need Hepar at all. I should have left him alone. he cleared up in due time- regained his usual weight. He went along for five years without a hiccough or any other trouble and then it returned and Dulcamara again stopped it promptly. The next time it occurred was about three years later. In the meantime I had moved to New Jersey. The daughter telegraphed me one day that her father was hiccoughing and I sent them Dulcamara I received a letter from her that it had done no good, that he was still hiccoughing, and he had a lot of symptoms. I sent him Arsenic, but he died hiccoughing.
CHAIRMAN J. HUTCHINSON: What was the moon doing when it wasnt waning? It doesnt wane but one week, does it?.
DR. J.W. KRICHBAUM: Two weeks; from the full point of the complete change is two weeks, not one week. The moon I have always gazed at has a four weeks cycle.
DR. A. H. GRIMMER: I think Dr. Boger has opened up something that is really worthwhile. We have heard this question of the relation of moon phases to drugs almost ever since homoeopathy began, and there have been many bitter controversies over it without really knowing the truth about it one way or the other. Dr. Boger has given us an opportunity now to prove it scientifically. The way he is taking it up it is quite unique. We will be able to tell what a drug is doing during these lunar phases. There is no question that the moon governs a great deal of natural phenomenon in nature. That has been proven from time immemorial. The tides are notorious examples.
DR. J.W. WAFFENSMITH: Occasionally I get a case that is very much the same as Dr. Krichbaums case, influenced by some particular phase of the moon, possibly the full moon, and after making a careful analysis of the case and carefully selecting the remedy that condition is considerably modified or disappears, with a general improvement in the patient. But subsequently I will find an increasing aggravation at another phase of the moon.
This may be perplexing, and if there is any question as to whether there has been an improvement or whether there is a return of an aggravation of a group symptom it may lead one to the conclusion that the remedy has not been properly selected. If the remedy is a near-similimum it would be better to leave that case alone, because the probabilities are that after awhile the new condition will also become modified as the improvement of the patient goes along. This explanation is from a miasmatic standpoint.
The patient has a complex miasm. The particular miasmatic activity at the time may produce an aggravation under a certain phase of the moon, which is a part of the totality of the case, not necessarily very important, but a part of the totality of the case, the same as any other symptom. There may be a symptom running through that case which may not be affected by the first dose or the second dose of the remedy that is given, but that case is improving.
If we change that remedy we will further complicate the case because the second phase of the evolvement of this curative condition represents an other angle of a complicated miasmatic case. It represents another phase which possibly has lain dormant and through the improvement of another angle this latent angle comes into the picture and produces a group of symptoms which are highly beneficial to the curing of that case. Therefore it brings us back to the proposition that when we have (and I will reiterate) a near-similimum and there is a shifting of symptom groups it behoves us, I believe, to wait and be patient and the reward will come in the further improvement of the case.
DR. H. FARRINGTON: In looking over the list I notice that Natrum carb. is not included.
DR. C.M. BOGER: I cant put in everything out of my own experience.
DR. H. FARRINGTON: I was in hope that I would find it. Many years ago I cured and enormous goitre in a boy of seventeen and practically the only indication which was peculiar was that the goitre enlarged at some phase of the moon- I have forgotten whether it was the waning moon or the full moon. I think it was worst in the full moon.
DR. C.M. BOGER: Look it up, doctor. I want that for my chart.
DR. C.A. DIXON: I am connected with the courts, in making commitments to the asylum of lunacy cases. We find that we always have more commitment cases at the full moon that at any other time. We have checked it up for years.
DR. G.B. STEARNS: In our clinic we had two cases that were definitely worse at moon phases. One was a case with symptoms of gastric ulcer which was always worse once a month- always at the new moon. The other one was a case of epilepsy in a woman who always had her case at the full moon. Bufo was her remedy. The remedy in the first case was Lycopodium.
That you may know you are not dealing purely with moonshine as it is traditionally known moonshine is polarized light, not ordinary light. And if your mind is a bit twisted on what polarized light is, it is as though the light came through a set of bars and only the vibrations in one direction get through. All the others are suppressed.
DR. J.W. KRICHBAUM: I was talking to the doctor who had charge of the womans department of the Kentucky Asylum and she told me that seventy per cent of her epileptic cases were aggravated at the full moon. She didnt have the percentages at the other phases of the moon.
DR. D.PULFORD: May I confirm both what Dr. Dixon and Dr. Krichbaum have said. At the Middletown State Hospital we count on patients “blowing up”, which is the term they use for it, more at that phase of the moon than at any other time.
PRESIDENT G. STEVENS: I have had several cases where the patients were definitely sleepless at the full moon, and who were sleepless even when the moon was clouded or the room darkened. So that it wasnt merely a matter of light. The sleeplessness was intense.
DR. C.M. BOGER: Do you remember the remedies?
PRESIDENT G. STEVENS: Sulphur was used in one case.
DR.C.M. BOGER: There is one thing here to which I want to draw your attention. Much to my surprise, Gelsemium has three squares. It is entitled to another one, making it four squares. Gelsemium is worse at the full moon. There are many surprises in this thing, and it surprised me just a little that Gelsemium is worse at the full moon.
Dr. Waffensmith is entirely borne out by what Dr. Kent says. I read the article not long ago in which he speaks of this peculiar unfoldment of cases. He says there is only one thing to do and that is to wait and let them unfold and give your remedy very rarely, one or twice a year may be, at the most three times a year. I think this study is going to help to bear that thing out also, and, as I said before, it opens a great door which we may enter if we will. Now, are you willing? That is the next thing. In order to be willing, you must do the work.
Born in Western Pennsylvania, he graduated from the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and subsequently Hahnemann Medical College of Philadelphia. He moved to Parkersburg, W. Va., in 1888, practicing there, but also consulting worldwide. He gave lectures at the Pulte Medical College in Cincinnati and taught philosophy, materia medica, and repertory at the American Foundation for Homoeopathy Postgraduate School. Boger brought BÅ“nninghausen's Characteristics and Repertory into the English Language in 1905. His publications include :
Boenninghausen's Characteristics and Repertory
Boenninghausen's Antipsorics
Boger's Diphtheria, (The Homoeopathic Therapeutics of)
A Synoptic Key of the Materia Medica, 1915
General Analysis with Card Index, 1931
Samarskite-A Proving
The Times Which Characterize the Appearance and Aggravation of the Symptoms and their Remedies