DR. MOORE: One dose?.
DR. GRIGGS: No. I gave it every three hours for one day. I always repeat the dose until there is improvement. My interpretation of Hahnemanns idea is to repeat the remedy until improvement is established, and then withhold it so long as improvement continues.
I think the worst cough I have ever heard in all my practice with children, the loudest cough, is produced by the nosode Pertussin. I have seen them cough and gag and retch, so you would think they were going to pass out the loudest kind of cough. It is called Coqueluchin now. It was first proved by John Clarke, of London, and I took his hints and I used it in some of the intractable coughs of children, with very prompt results. I sent over to Nelson and got his potency, the 1 and 10, and they are both very efficient, and I have cleared up some coughs that have gone the rounds and had all sorts of prescriptions loud, hard, retching coughs.
DR. AMES: I want to mention a remedy used in our own family. My daughter, when she was two years old, was desperately ill with whooping cough. I had prescribed everything I ever heard and got no results. We had consultations with a better prescriber than I was, and the remedy was Arnica, and the symptom was the child woke up and cried before the cough because it was going to hurt her.
DR. JACKSON: That old saw about the man who follows his nose wherever he goes, is not a bad things at all, particularly when you get accustomed to following your nose. Dr. Hubbard spoke of it in that case, and more than likely her nose was correct. The Health Departments laboratory test was probably wrong. You more than likely had a laryngeal diphtheria which didnt come up high enough for you to get a positive culture.
DR. FARRINGTON: This is such a large subject that we could talk all night on it. I havent heard anyone mention the old-fashioned garden herb, Thyme. I have found that when you get a cough with gagging, hard, racking give that medicine. It is the principal ingredient of a proprietary substance called Pertussin. This is one reason the name of the nosode was changed from Pertussin to Coqueluchin.
DR. VAN NORDEN: Dr. Hubbards cough remedies repertory is much larger than mine, but I still want to mention, though Dr. Sutherland took the wind out of my sails, Rumex. Dr. Hubbard did mention Rumex. I hadnt found any indication as far as I knew, for Rumex, either in Illinois or in Philadelphia, nor part of New Jersey, until I got down in Maryland, in Chesapeake City, and I suppose I have had two or three hundred cases of cough which Rumex has cleared up. The indication I get is complaint of a tickling here in the throat pit, and cough and cough. Once doesnt satisfy, and they cough half a dozen times or so and get a speck of mucus loose, and that is the end of it for a little while, and it starts up again.
Then I ask, “How is the cough at night?”.
“Well, it is worse from ten to thirty minutes when I lie down”.
And they dont cough again all night, and they have this of course, oftentimes, the cold air aggravation, also want to put the bed clothes over their head. I have cured many, many cases of it after Arsenicum and Ferrum phos., and many of these active epidemic cases of croupy cough I find Rumex comes in to clear that up.
Then I had a case down there of a lady who couldnt talk and couldnt have company because as soon as they talked a little while, she would have this tickling cough. Somebody told her to come to my office, but she didnt do it. Finally she got a bad cough, and couldnt seem to get rid of it. I cleared up the tickling cough and she didnt have it for a long time.
They went out to California a year or two after wars and she sent from California to Chesapeake City to get some Rumex.
DR. WILLIAMS: I think Dr. Roberts cant do anything more for homoeopathy than to emphasize the importance of modalities. Dr. Hubbard and I had the privilege of studying with Dr. Roberts for the summers at Boston when the American Foundation was there, and I have been so impressed in the years since we heard that work regarding the modalities of cough remedies.
You know Florida is a hotbed for respiratory troubles, with so many tourists coming in, with all sorts of upper respiratory tract infections, and we are busy treating such cases.
We seem to have fairly good luck with many of the coughs, and I have found the coughs which are worse in Miami need Pulsatilla. Pulsatilla has a dry evening cough and moist in the morning, and the cough that is worse lying down, and relieved the minute the patient sits up is quite frequently relieved with Pulsatilla. Nightly cough, Hyoscyamus, worse lying, doesnt have loose expectoration in the morning, Pulsatilla, but many time I have seen Hyoscyamus has relieved stubborn coughs of influenza or virus infection, as they call it now; and three years ago we had at one time over fifty thousand Army trainees and they brought us a new disease.
Many of the young trainees were ill with the virus infection that has spread over the country. These cases have not been the type of the old influenzal infections we have seen all the years (and I have finished my twenty-nine winters practicing among tourists, and we have had influenzal infections and various upper respiratory tract infections) but this thing we have had since the trainees came to Florida is different.
They do not have aching and headache and backache. These people run not very high temperatures, but they are sick quite a good many weeks. We are not able to control it with the indicated remedy. Many of them drag along inspite of all you can do, and I know in quite a few instances I heard the Army physician say that many of the boys they had to keep at bed rest for twelve weeks in the Army hospital at twelve weeks they were still running temperatures of 99.5 and 100 and no matter what you do, many of the cases, if x-rayed, will show spots in the lung tissue that look like cotton spots, and those cotton spots are pneumonia, pneumonitis, or a virus pneumonia, and, I am sorry to say, with a stethoscope you dont hear at thing.
The only way you can make a diagnosis is by use of the x-ray and in the Army hospitals all the boys with the temperatures were x- rayed. That was routine, and generally they would find evidence of a virus pneumonia.
A peculiar thing about those virus pneumonias they are like the good old-fashioned bronchopneumonias we used to see around New York. A person would have a little focus, a pneumonic patch, bronchopneumonia, and the temperature would come down, and things look better, and within a few days the temperature would go up another focus of infection and little consolidation; but in those case you saw then, they had physical signs you could detect with a stethoscope, and rales, heard very distinctly. Unfortunately, in these cases, going over the chest with a stethoscope, you cant hear a thing, and the only way to diagnose is by x-ray. But they are persistent.
They dont want to use sulfa drugs any more for pure and simple virus infections. They do not respond to sulfa drugs; in fact, I think they do harm. The only cases given sulfa drugs is when the Army physician thinks the cases seem to have mixed infection. They make a rule that if a pneumonia patient or a person running a temperature, with a high leukocyte count, of 15,000 to 20,000, they will try a sulfa drug, believing that leukocyte count is due to the mixed infection or entrance of streptococci in the virus infection, but with a normal or subnormal leukocyte count, if they have leukopenia, they withhold the sulfa drugs entirely and never think of giving a sulfa drug now for the pure and simple virus pneumonia.
I am quite proud of the way homoeopathy acts in these cases. They seem to do well, if you get the right remedy.
DR. MOORE: Tuberculinum has given a very fine account of itself in the spotty cases.
DR. WILLIAMS: I should have mentioned that.
DR. HUBBARD: I want to thank Dr. Sutherland for speaking of the shift of remedies. I find often that in a case where the patient is typically helped, if you dont go deeper and give a chronic in between attacks, they are likely to shift from that remedy and go waltzing down the line of remedies. Repeated attacks each time have different things. We ought to bear that in mind and make our acutes, when they are better, come back and be chronic patients.
