On the strength of that, Joseph Miller of vienna and, before him, a man by the name of Ureneck who had given the study of scrofulous keratitis attention-in other words, it was the life work of one of these gentlemen who was the assistant of the other-found that tuberculin given intracutaneously (I am not arguing for it) had helped many patients.
They also found that when it was used in the 6x. intracutaneously, the patient, having a local action developed a pronounced local one, with some fever, loss of weight and recurrence of a cough that had not been evident for a while, and general malaise, and, lastly the specific symptoms which is the most important reaction, and that is the one that either brings an aggravation of the original disease, that is secondary to the fundamental infection, latent infection of tuberculosis, or in some cases the secondary reaction or, I call it, the specific reaction and it belongs to Hahnemann, has been very destructive to the eye.
As a result, Miller, who led the campaign on diagnosis and treatment of tuberculous lesions of the eye, which he called scrofulous in contradistinction to the ordinary, referred to tuberculosis-because in this disease we do not have the organisms present in the secondary lesion but only in the primary. Here we have the toxins. He found that, as he increased the potency or decreased the strength of the tuberculin he had fewer bad secondary reactions or specific reactions, than in those he gave the higher dilutions.
May I now shift over into the homoeopathic side. In other words, he found the higher the potency, the less aggravation and the more prompt the secondary effect of Hahnemann or the secondary phase of Wright. I have been in intimate touch with this man since he was a young man and I was a young man, studying with the same teachers in Vienna. We have had many conferences. About the time I saw him in 38 and 39 he had reached about the seventeenth or eighteenth centesimal, and I was working on the eighty-fourth. I found some mean reactions, particularly aggravation at the primary focus; in other words, the focal reaction.
So in the meantime I have gotten around the 15m. to the 20M., and I am getting very slight positive phases or the primary action of Hahnemann, or reaction-very beneficial.
As to how much higher I will go, will depend upon the length of time I am spared between now and my demise, but I have someone working on it. When I tell you that it takes three years to go from the original preparation, one hour a day, however, to the 20,000th, it may be that one of these days I will go much higher.
The only difference in my administration of it is that I use it intramuscularly as a diagnostic test, along with the therapeutic effect.
The doctor mentioned the value of Tuberculinum. It is as nearly specific as anything can be. That other remedies fit in after that, or even before it, is natural, because we are all, as the essayist pointed out, heavily infected with many things, and the effect of a remedy is specific for only a part of the total clinical picture. What good you do with your other remedies for other parts is going to do good for the whole.
DR. MOYER : Just to take right off from there, here is an illustration. During the last six or eight weeks I had this experience. A young lady, just twenty, came to me. She had a very vicious acne indurata. That was, of course, the first thing you would see. After a bit she showed me her limbs which were, as they say, allergic, and were just getting red with an erythema.
She had been to three of the ten men in our town, and she said, “I get worse.” Another thing that made me so anxious about the allergies was that the girl said, “Oh, dont give me any ultraviolet ray. Every time I get that I get so deathly sick”.
Following the advice that Dr. Sutherland has just given you, not to give the dose right away, I want to bring out that it took me five days before I really felt I ought to give a dose of medicine. I thought it was Rhus; I thought it was Bryonia. i went upstairs to my library and looked it over. I thought that was no way to do, so I went all over the thing. I spent three afternoons studying it. Of course, acne indurata is a Sulphur condition. I gave this patient the 50 M., on the advice to the father that two days later she should come in.
Two days later the mother called me and said, “You know, Gladys is so sick she cant even get out of bed.” “What is the matter ?” “She just lies in a pool of water”. I went over. I said, “Oh, she is better.” The father said, “Yes, she is better”.
After undressing the young lady I noticed that the acne was much improved. They could all see it. I had not told them before that there were two very distinct things there, the acne indurata and the eczematous condition. She had, as the doctor said, a bowel condition. Constipation was very prominent and she had had the condition for a long time. She also had been working in a woollen factory, where the girls work with wool in their laps and it gets on to their arms. There is where part of the trouble came from.
Then the indication was Aloes. If you have never used Aloes in eczema, just look it up. It is a wonderful remedy. With Aloes, in two weeks after the first dose was given, that skin was practically clean. In four weeks it was absolutely clean.
The father said, “Cant she go back to her job ?” I said “I would get myself another job.” She came back just last week and said, “Doctor, just look at my legs and my arms. That is back again.” I said, “I did tell you not to go back to work, and you went back to the same place”.
That is the answer she got, and she got some more Aloes.
DR. BONNELL : There is an old saying that you can lead a horse to water but you cant make him drink, if I were an “old school” man interested in eczemas, as I have been for years, Dr. Sutherland could lead me to the watering place and make me drink, I believe, because I think this chart fully brings out one of the greatest things we have in eczema.
I worked quite a while on allergy and I did not seem to get any place. I think we learn by our mistakes. Then I began to work on history. i was surprised to find the background of tuberculosis and syphilis.
I then started on a number of my cases, especially those where I had the tubercular history, giving Tuberculinum 1 M. I was so pleased in a number of my prescriptions that I made the mistake of giving the remedy in the 1 M. to practically 90 percent of my eczemas, and I had some sad experiences. I found, as I think Dr. Sutherland has told you, that the key to treatment in over fifty percent of the cases in heredity.
DR. CLAPP : I just want to rise for some enlightenment on two symptoms of Cadmium sulfate. I was laid up for nine months, quite a few years ago. After going to all the skin men in my country and to some good homoeopaths, I found the remedy was Cadmium sulph. CM.
There were two symptoms which stuck out preeminently. I wanted somebody to kill me; I didnt want to kill myself. I was chilly all the time. I had a fire in the grate day after day in June and July. I took one dose of Cadmium sulph. on Sunday morning at ten oclock. I wired to Chicago for it. I did not get the aggravation until nine oclock Monday night. There was another symptom, and that was trembling. There were three symptoms, chilliness, trembling, and wanting somebody to kill me. At nine oclock the aggravation came. I began to shake. I happened to be down town. I could not get the keys out of my pocket to unlock the garage door. I had to have help. I shook for four hours. My teeth chattered. I was intensely cold. I just begged for somebody to shoot me, and I am a fairly rational man. I want to live as long as I can.
At this time it looked as if I had white cotton gloves on. I had used all the solutions mentioned by famous men in our district, including some of Chicago, and I could not loosen that up. I just felt like I was bound with iron fetters.
On Wednesday morning the gloves just slipped off. The one dose of Cadmium sulph. was all I had. I n ten days I was back to work. I have had hundreds and hundreds of skin cases since.
Dont tie yourself to Tuberculinum. You are going to lose out. Cadmium sulfate is one of the poorest proved drugs we have in the materia medica. It is one of the most wonderful remedies we have in skin trouble. In fact, I have made up my mind that Sulphur is virtually never indicated as the remedy per se in skin trouble. It is the sulfates of our remedies that are the intercurrent remedies.
DR. PULFORD : The treatment of eczema is constitutional. The suppression of external manifestations is no cure. I want to illustrate one case to you that I think will prove that very nicely.
I was treating a lady from Michigan, for eczema. Her body was covered. Along with her came another lady with a little eczematous eruption on the back of her hand, she said to me, “Doctor, how long will it take to cure that little eruption ?” I said, “Possibly about a month.” “A month !” she said. “I have just come from the doctor doctoring my child and he said he could cure it in two days.” “He is the man to cure it,” I said. “You are a lady of your word; will you come back to me in a year and show me the backs of those hands ?” She said, “Ill be glad to”.
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.