We need a materia medica just as the doctor is working on now.
DR. MOORE: I should like to say a word on Arsenic; I miss so many of my patients that when I make a hit I am happy.
This was a gentleman who is seventy-four years old. He has angina. In the first place, as a baby no one expected him to live. He was an asthmatic for about twenty years, then that left and now for twenty years he has had one of the most severe anginas that anyone can possibly have. Doctors who have seen him in an attack have marveled that he ever came through. He hasnt been able to take a glass of cold water in all these years, not once, without going into one of these terrible conditions.
It he has a violent dream, it will carry him into this, unless he can get on his feet. If he can stand on his feet, he gets relief. That is a very strong Arsenic symptoms in the chronic cases; if they can get out on their feet, they can get relief; and I have seen him standing like that at eight oclock in the morning and have asked him, “How long have you been standing like that?” “Since eleven last night.”.
He couldnt sit down or lie down without staring an attack.
Last September he was very ill. He was standing for days and it looked as though any day would be the last. I was getting to go to New York, and I said, “He may be dead tomorrow morning, but I will give him a dose of Arsenic,” and I gave it in the 200th.
I supposed I would read the death notice when I came back, but he became free of his symptoms of angina and was able to eat as he hadnt been for a long, long time. Along in February he began to get a little into it again, and I gave him the thousandth. It gave him quite a knock, but he is enjoying pretty good health right now.
So, that is just a little arsenic and just a little bragging.
DR. BOGER; Dr. Farrington opened up a strange chapter in the history of homoeopathic medicine, because, as he says, he finds many works are simply copies of others, but anyone conversant with other languages sees more of that.
Much as I think of Dr. Lippe, his Materia Medica was a verbatim copy of Boenninghausens Characteristics, except for remedies that were produced since Boenninghausens Characteristics was written.
You run across that sort of thing all the time. I dont hold that as a discredit to homoeopathy at all, because when you see a good thing, you ought to be able to pass it along. You need all that help, including Lippes.
DR. EDWARDS: I want to say one thing about passing the good word along. Last summer Dr. Boger gave me a specimen of Plasmodium. Along the St. Lawrence River we are not supposed to have malarial fever or what is quoted now in the journals as undulant fever. If you have a chronic case and you cant get it routed out, it seems that a dose of Plasmodium will bring out the latent symptoms and lead to the real difficulty.
That has happened not in one case but in quite a number I have had for a number of years there. Plasmodium has done a great deal of good work.
Arsenic is a big remedy, and I can verify one of the doctors statements, and that is, pain, aggravated by drinking water; no matter where the pain is, it has been relieved quickly by Arsenicum.
DR. BOGER: I want to say something about the history of Plasmodium. Several years ago I received a letter from a man in England. He said that he had had a case of malignant malarial fever, the kind where the patient dies in the third chill or the second, and the had taken some of his blood serum and potentized it, and he sent me this graft of 30 potency taken from the man who died, and that is it. It is from pernicious malarial fever.
DR. GRIMMER: Can that be obtained?.
DR. BOGER: I am the only one who has it. You can have it if you write to me.
DR. ALFRED PULFORD: In closing the only thing that I can say to you is that those who have seen the light are beginning to inquire into it more and more, particularly so in England, India, and the West Indies; now it is coming back into out own country because of the fact that our materia medica is confusing, and we have no method whereby we can get an intelligent introduction to it. There is no remedy that produces directly all the symptoms attributed to it and, consequently, those symptoms are not necessary. They are the trimming on the fabric and what we need out of the remedy is the fabric.
These facts cannot fail to influence the great question of matter and force, how they are combined and in a continued flux change in innumerable forms and quantities. Those facts evolved by homoeopathics will sooner or later be acknowledged by unbiased natural and other philosophers who in them will find new views leading to a better understanding of the organic world especially as the medical part is concerned.
The crude notions of materialism must yield to the induction into the nature of matter as the vehicle of force and as the carrier of a number of forces which under proper conditions can be isolated and transferred upon other matter, so that the idea of the inertia of matter takes another meaning, matter being rather the unmoved receptacle of the forces which it endowed until they undergo changes in consequence of other forces. The idea of inertia is not warranted by the facts because nothing is really at rest. All mater is constantly under the dominion of all kinds of forces and the apparent rest is only a regular system of forces running into each other in a circle by a continued equalization (Lagrange) mediated by the least quantity of action (Maupertius)-the least plus additutum (Fincke).-B. FINCKE, M.D., 1893,.
