Find out what drugs and chemicals the patients has been taking and using externally and internally. Stop medicines and drugs of all kinds once and for all before giving the homoeopathically indicated remedy. Chemical interference with the action of the remedy may or may not be a very real obstacle to recovery. As long as there is any doubt best eliminate whatever may possibly be a factor in perpetuating the constitutional disorder or that may perhaps more or less antidote or divert the remedy.
Having removed all the probable obstacles to recovery and having found what we consider to be the actual similimum we prescribe the remedy and hopefully, in fact confidently, await results.
Just here is a point I wish to stress and that is the kind of improvement that is to be looked for under the action of the homoeopathic remedy. No matter what particular symptoms may persist, if the patient looks better, steps firmer and quicker, says he feels stronger, has more ambition, more interest in things and the world looks brighter it is practically certain that the remedy is acting in an orderly and curative manner.
Now suppose after a time improvement lags or comes to a standstill or the patient gets worse. Relapses are all too common in chronic patients. Just at this point many a case is confused or spoiled by stepping in with another remedy or an untimely repetition of the same remedy. Careful and thoughtful deliberation on the part of the physician is most essential to the ultimate welfare of the patient.
What are the possibilities?.
First, a temporary aggravation or reaction–a mere passing phase in the recovery process. Often a number of such reactions will occur and still the remedy continue to act.
Second, failure of the patient to continue his whole hearted co-operation–he may have grown weary in well doing.
Finally, the remedy may really have ceased to act.
The discriminating physician will determine which is the case and govern himself accordingly.
To the average patient and to many physicians the word chronic does indeed convey a threat of incurability, but correct homoeopathy supplemented in the way indicated will often accomplish the apparently impossible.
Therapeutics will take on a keener edge and cut through and cut away the barnacles of time and the chronically sick will become actually and permanently well.
PHILADELPHIA,.
DISCUSSION.
DR. C. L. OLDS: I want to commend this very valuable paper of Dr. Underhills. I think we are rather up against it when it comes to food. This is one of the great obstructions that needs attention in a chronic case. It is very difficult to tell your patient just what to take, particularly of manufactured products. Of course, when it comes to fresh fruits and fresh vegetables, in general, that is easy, although some of those things have been doctored.
They have been sprayed or ammoniated or something of that sort, so that it is very difficult to know whether your patient is getting pure food when it comes to the manufactured products. Very likely the flour your patient is using has been bleached. You know what that means. The prunes have probably been shrunken down by the use of some preservative. The raisins have been sulphured. Almost every variety of adulteration is used in preparing commercial food stuffs. That is what we are up against.
There is one other thing that might interest you, which Dr. Underhill has brought to mind in speaking of ice cream. Last winter I had a very bad case of hiccup. I prescribed unsuccessfully for five or six days. Then the patient ate a nice little dish of vanilla ice cream and the hiccups immediately ceased for about two days. She took another dose of ice cream and they were completely routed.
DR. A. H. GRIMMER: It is worth my trip and expense from Chicago to hear this one paper. Dr. Underhill has given us a classical, concise, understandable record of how to manage chronic cases. It is true we are up against the food proposition, as Dr. Underhill has stated. However, we can eliminate a great many of these injurious things with which we have to contend.
There is one other thing that should be included. Of course, Dr. Underhill included it in the adulterants of all kinds, that is the chlorination of water. This is among some of the very vicious things that are being done right along under the guise of public health service. I think that all of us, no matter how long we have been in practice, no matter how much we have been imbued with the teachings that Hahnemann laid down, can profit immensely by a study of Dr. Underhills paper, and I want to thank him for bringing it to us.
DR. W. W. WILSON: I sometimes wonder how so many people live to be old. I wonder, too, what on earth we are going to do when it comes to water supplies for large places. New York City recently had a suit in the United States Supreme Court against New Jersey and Pennsylvania, trying to persuade the Government to permit them to take their water supply from the Delaware River. When I was a student in Philadelphia the hospital was crowded with typhoid fever and pneumonia patients. There wasnt anything else to show the students. I guess they must chlorinate the water–perhaps Dr. Underhill would know–for they dont have very much typhoid fever there any more.
You know that nowadays the poor farmer has his fruit, his vegetables, and everything else eaten up by insects and other pests. What is he going to do? What are we going to do about it? Apples and fruit must be sprayed otherwise we wouldnt have any fruit. Yet somehow or other we do live to be old.
DR. E. UNDERHILL, JR.: In regard to the filtration of the water supply in Philadelphia, typhoid fever was very rampant in Philadelphia when we first moved there in the nineties, and now you hardly come across a case. I didnt serve my internship in Philadelphia, but in another city. At no time did we have fewer than six or eight cases of typhoid fever in the hospital. We often had as many as 10 or 20 cases. Since I have been in Philadelphia I have only seen two cases. The filtration of the water supply has reduced the number of typhoid fever cases, but I think the chemical treatment of the water a absolutely pernicious.
I advise my chronic patients to get spring water if they can, and if not, distilled water, although there is some question as to whether distilled water is safe. Some say it is very good and some say it is bad. I dont know.
In regard to fruits, I dont think any one should eat the skin of fruit unless it has been very thoroughly washed. They are putting a paraffin coating of some kind other heat and pressure on fruit. It makes a fine, greasy, impervious coating over the fruit, and it prevents it from shrinking and decaying, but we are getting a dose of paraffin every time we eat it. We get rid of some of it by peeling the fruit. I think we should either peel or wash all our fruit. Of course, most of the vitamins in vegetables and fruits are right beneath the surface, in the lower layer of the skin.
I might say that chronic disease is really one of the blessings of civilization. The more civilized we become, the more mechanized, the more canned and processed foods we have. The more adulteration of food and drink the more chronic cases we are bound to have. I think it is one of the great aetiological factors in the progress of civilization.
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.