As the 200th didnt hold, in a week, when the condition was just as bad as it was at the beginning, shrieking all night and with all of these symptoms, the 1000th brought the patient right out and he made an uneventful recovery. There was a loss of twenty pounds in this little lad in ten days. This was a case of meningismus, and the easy way of determining meningismus from meningitis is that when you have a cure by a homoeopathic remedy it is meningismus. This was meningismus.
DR. POWERS: I had a case relating to this subject. A man fell in his bathroom and hit himself against the corner of a washstand and had a severe, painful bruise there, and the nerve was involved. He was rather careless. He went on a long automobile trip, driving the car 200 miles, and when he came home late at night he went to bed in a very cold bedroom. The next morning he woke up with terrific pains in the back of his head, and he called me up.
He lived out in the country, and before I could get to him he called in an allopathic physician who injected morphine, which did not control the pain. When I got there I gave him a dose of Cimicifuga 200, a teaspoon every hour for eight doses. After the third dose the pain stopped.
In my opinion the carelessness after the injury caused the inflammation to pass up through the nerve stem into the meninges of the spine, and I think it was a case of meningismus because the man was a very healthy individual and there was no breaking in the skin or anything, and I dont think there was any infection. I did not make any test.
DR. SUTHERLAND: I was just going to make a comment on Dr. Moores case. He said when you cure a case with a homoeopathic remedy it is meningismus, but Dr. Burgess-Webster cited a case of meningitis cured with homoeopathy.
DR. GRIGGS: I have been chief of a childrens hospital for over forty years, and Dr. Sutherland was an intern in my service.
The curing of meningitis must be done by the homoeopathic remedy, and is done. In fact I have had the laboratory on my heels for years and years, and I stood before the Society and reported a cure of a tuberculous meningitis which was verified by every laboratory report we had. I reported a case of influenzal meningitis that was verified by laboratories in two instances.
I want to congratulate Dr. Sutherland. He gave us a well written case of meningismus. My experience is that meningismus occurs as a complication during the course of an acute toxemia. When I find a child developing positive symptoms, a positive Kernigs sign, I usually do a lumbar or cisternal tap and have the fluid examined, because in hospital we are checked up if we make any mistakes; in those case I have usually found a clear fluid with a normal cell count of from two to ten, and sugar reduction, and the homoeopathic remedy has in all instances cured those cases, so I cant give you any autopsy reports of what meningismus really consists of at autopsy.
The two remedies that have been used have been Aconite and Veratrum viride. I think Veratrum viride is more frequently indicated in meningismus than Belladonna. Belladonna is more indicated where you have the inflammatory condition of a meningitis, where it is tubercular, staphylococcus, or whatever type it is. In the cases of meningismus the Aconite and the Veratrum viride have been the best remedies. We get many of them in our hospital and we clear them all up with a homoeopathic remedy.
DR. SUTHERLAND: I would like to say that I havent found Aconite very commonly indicated in anything up in Vermont. I dont know why. Perhaps the climate isnt the kind of climate that produces Aconite conditions, and I am quite sure if I had been more thorough when I first saw the child, Aconite would have been prescribed the first night. I was careless; I was sore because I had to be there, anyway. You know how we got once in a while; we are all human.
I dont know very much about Aconite. They used to tell us in school that where there was no pathology; or within the first forty-eight hours where you have a sudden onset of high fever, that was Aconite. I should have known it in this case. When I did come to study it, I found it was hard to make a differentiation between Aconite and Belladonna, because there were so many features in common between the two remedies.
DR. STEVENS: How restless was the patient?.
DR. SUTHERLAND: His arms were moving like that (indicating) he wasnt boring his head, but his face was twitching at the tip and his legs were kicking up, and when he shifted his hands they trembled.
DR. STEVENS: Restless would suggest the Aconite, wouldnt it?.
DR. SUTHERLAND: When you left the child alone it would talk, and every once in a while get furiously delirious and jump right out of bed and bite and kick and scratch and be mad, and get red in the face.
Allan D. Sutherland was born in Northfield, Vermont in 1897, delivered by the local homeopathic physician. The son of a Canadian Episcopalian minister, his father had arrived there to lead the local parish five years earlier and met his mother, who was the daughter of the president of the University of Norwich. Four years after Allan’s birth, ministerial work lead the family first to North Carolina and then to Connecticut a few years afterward.
Starting in 1920, Sutherland began his premedical studies and a year later, he began his medical education at Hahnemann Medical School in Philadelphia.
Sutherland graduated in 1925 and went on to intern at both Children’s Homeopathic Hospital and St. Luke’s Homeopathic Hospital. He then was appointed the chief resident at Children’s. With the conclusion of his residency and 2 years of clinical experience under his belt, Sutherland opened his own practice in Philadelphia while retaining a position at Children’s in the Obstetrics and Gynecology Department.
In 1928, Sutherland decided to set up practice in Brattleboro.