In such desperate cases demanding quick help, one can more than ever experience the great advantage of the higher and highest potencies, but it requires abandoning of coarse materialistic prejudices. A pity it is that this great truth, the result of reliable experience (the basis of our entire doctrine) does not always find recognition, not even in the ranks of homoeopathy, especially not among the younger physicians, which lack this necessary experience.
APHORISM 52. It is not unusual that patients weep voluntarily in fever or other sickness, but when they weep involuntarily that is a bad sign.
COMMENT: When patients with chronic diseases alternatingly weep or laugh hysterically, that is not unusual, but difficult of cure, and in dangerous acute conditions we know only one remedy: Stramonium, which has weeping during the day, and spasmodic laughing during the night. This difference has been given little consideration.
APHORISM 54. Patients with a burning fever and a tickling cough will not suffer much from great thirst.
COMMENT: While this aphorism has been repeated by Celsus, hence must have happened frequently, it has given commentators much difficulty, because, with the symptoms mentioned, the opposite is usually found : intense thirst.
However, just this unusual condition is of great value for our remedy selection, because it points to a few remedies only: Arsenicum, Conium, Phosphorus, Pulsatilla, Sabadilla and Squilla, and that makes the remedy selection easier when the associated symptoms are compared with these. These peculiarities are most desirable for the homoeopathist, but they embarrass the allopath who does not know what to do with them. If he pushes such symptoms aside, refusing to consider them, we put them at the head of the disease picture in order to add them to other symptoms to be elicited, whereupon the specific homoeopathic remedy unquestionably presents itself. In this lies the valuable advantage of an intimate familiarity with the Materia Medica Pura to the aid of the patient.
APHORISM 55. All fevers with glandular swellings are bad, except when they last only a day.
COMMENT: Also in this chapter Hippocrates seems to aim at the pestilential and typhoid diseases, in which, to be sure, such glandular swellings are dangerous omens. These bring in addition some other remedies to the fore, especially Belladonna, Kali carbonicum, and Sepia, which are not thought of in the customary typhoid fevers. Belladonna is especially indicated immediately in the beginning where congestion and the symptoms resulting from it are present; Kali is suitable later in chest and abdominal complaints.
APHORISM 56. It is a bad sign when a fever patient perspires without the fever intermitting; it shows excessive body fluid.
COMMENT: The homoeopathic physician differentiates carefully between cases in which the fever continues or increases with beginning or during perspiration, and those which persist after sweating. In both conditions there are bad and mild fevers, but those where with perspiration the fever tapers off (Arsenicum, Lycopodium, Rhus, etc.) are often worse than where after perspiration the fever continues (Calcarea carbonica, China, Mercurius, Phosphoric acid, Sepia, Sulphur, etc.). Hence one cannot admit the general application of this aphorism. Even less does it apply to the second part of the aphorism regarding excess of body fluids, for just the last mentioned remedies belong among those which are prominent in the opposite condition: loss of body fluids, and when correctly, homoeopathically chosen and used, often bring astonishing improvement.
Therefore this aphorism must be accepted with much circumspection.
APHORISM 57. Clonic and tonic convulsions are often cured when fever attacks.
COMMENT: This can only apply to such convulsions which sometimes usher in a fever, and which are in the action of: Arnica, Arsenicum, Calcarea carbonica, China, Hyoscyamus, Ignatia and Rhus. Most other attacks of that kind are absolutely of a chronic nature, which may be silent during a fever (because a person cannot be sick in two ways), seem cured for a short period, but always return, and are only cured lastingly by suitably acting (antipsoric) remedies, unless they were caused suddenly by external agencies and are still new.
APHORISM 58. A sufferer from an ardent fever is cured by an attack of rigor.
COMMENT: Among the different complicated fevers we well know that some begin with heat and quit with chills without perspiration. Homoeopathy has several remedies with these peculiarities to which this also belongs, and it is found especially in Belladonna, Bryonia, Calcarea carbonica, Capsicum, Lycopodium, Nux vomica and Sepia. If one of these are some other corresponds homoeopathically to the entire symptom complex, including all the secondary symptoms, and is given in the small dose demanded, then a cure is had as well as in any other form. But without suitable medication the chills following the heat are hardly able to prevent a repetition, as one might surmise from the aphorism, which in no wise is supported by experience; rather we have seen cases where just such a fever (in spite of the “infallible” quinine) lasted for months till the carefully selected homoeopathic remedy cured quickly and lastingly.
APHORISM 60. Deafness coming during a fever is often cured when epistaxis or diarrhoea occur.
COMMENT: According to the text of this aphorism one should think that through epistaxis and diarrhoea in such cases not only deafness, but also the rest of the disease were cured. But parallel aphorisms and those of Celsus, together with experience, do not permit of such a conclusion. Loss of hearing can here only have head congestion as causative factor. In all other conditions like typhoid fever with sopor, and even more in chronic deafness, nothing helps.
In typhoid fever there rather occurs an aggravation as direct result of diarrhoea. There even are periods when this and other kinds of loss of body fluids (like blood-letting, diarrhoea, sweats, etc.) in acute diseases easily create a nervous condition in the patient. Such dangers are avoided best by not creating them. Perhaps, it is well to mention here briefly, that in bleeding, especially epistaxis, the juice of Thlaspi bursa pastoris is of great value, even in higher dilutions, in which there can be no cause for ascribing to it an astringent quality. Sometimes it suffices when a leaf or a few capsules are rubbed in the hand.
APHORISM 62. It is a bad omen if jaundice occurs in fevers before the seventh day.
COMMENT: Even though jaundice has its cause in the liver and gall-bladder, yet the main causative factors and accompanying symptoms suggest divers remedies which cure in time. But that jaundice occurring before the seventh day in fevers should indicate a greater danger is not borne out by experience. In many cases a mental emotion produces icterus the next day, which is cured the next day by Aconite, Chamomilla, Nux vomica, etc. We consider a cure here, if not more difficult, at least slower, when a liver trouble is at the base of it, and the icteric manifestations come later, as if often the case. The same applies to icterus in the pregnant, because the pressure of the pregnant uterus cannot be removed.
APHORISM 65. In fevers great heat about the bowels and heartburn are bad symptoms.
COMMENT: Burning pains in the stomach region are found in many remedies suitable as well for acute as chronic sickness, and therefore do not always present an isolated symptom suitable for a proper indication. In typhoid fevers, e.g., they are always undesirable symptoms, which however do not limit the number of suitable remedies such (Arsenicum, Bryonia, Nux vomica, Phosphorus, Rhus, Sulphur, etc.) and are not of much aid in the detailed search for other accompanying symptoms. Also contraction of the cardiac part of stomach often begins with such burning pains, and at that time when the trouble is not yet chronic, and passage of food into the stomach not yet seriously interfered with, Nux vomica or Ranunculus bulbosus promise speedy help.
But in severe cases a cure if not impossible, is much more difficult and uncertain, and aside from Carbo vegetabilis, Phosphorus, and especially Zincum often many other remedies may be indicated. Other symptomatic and accompanying burning stomach pains usually are easily overcome by properly chosen homoeopathic remedies. However, real acute gastritis is a very serious disease, and can quickly prove fatal, easily be mistaken for typhus abdominalis, and fortunately does not occur frequently, must immediately be treated by our strong antiphlogistic remedies like: Aconitum, Bryonia, Nux vomica, Phosphorus, etc. If these are properly chosen and given in high potency, danger of life is usually soon overcome.
APHORISM 72. It is bad when the urine is very clear and pale in encephalitis.
COMMENT: A well known experience, and a symptom which we hardly meet in our remedies for such phrenitic brain affections (Belladonna, Hyoscyamus, Lachesis, Phosphorus), but prominently in our antiphlogisticum Aconitum. This proves that the stage of the disease where Aconitum is promising, has passed as soon as the urine become light and watery. Therefore, when in this dangerous disease such a sign appears, a homoeopathist will hardly use Aconitum, except where it alone has the predominant accompanying symptoms, for it might, if not absolutely indicated, lose irrevocable time.
