DR. W. W. YOUNG: About three years ago there was an article which appeared in the bulletin of the Menninger brothers, one of whom in the war was Chief of Psychiatry of the service, One of the two brothers about six weeks ago was united with the University of Kansas, which marks a move in the change in the emphasis on undergraduate education in the United States. In this journal there was an article dealing with a rather extensive research project with curare. The attempt was originally to find some agent other than those already known, such as metrazol and insulin, so that by use of it in cases of convulsions they could by shock therapy return the patient to normal physiological status.
In their work they had quite a series of these convulsive manifestations, all different diagnoses, but convulsions was the major feature, and by purely, we might say, empirical experience, they found that peculiarly enough a certain number of their patients did remarkably well, and others did very poorly.
The researches then displayed rather superhuman ingenuity by beginning to wonder why one patient might respond and the others not, so they proceeded to take the anamnesis of each case in the totality of symptoms, both subjective and objective, and began to select their cases on the basis of their what-you-might-call homoeopathic symptomatology.
Then it was strange, but rather paradoxical, the thing that came to their attention, that once they did this type of selection, they were faced with a peculiar fact, that their best results were to be obtained by the employment of the smallest possible dose, rather than a large one, and their final conclusion in the paragraph–I cannot remember the exact words, but it was to this effect, that this is an astonishing discovery, possibly for the first time recognized in all of medicine, and that on the basis of this, if our conclusions are correct and our observations are exact enough, and our abstractions from our observations are also correct, we may infer that if other research is carried on in this manner, perhaps a great deal of benefit can be had for the human race. (Applause).
DR. J. W. WAFFENSMITH [closing discussion]: I thank you for this discussion. It is my opinion that there are no physical symptoms about corresponding mental ones. They may be modified to such an extent that they are not found; but there are mental symptoms which corresponds to physical, as well as physical that correspond to mental, because, after all, the human organism is a duality, and this duality shows both angles of the whole.
Education: Cincinnati College of Medicine & Surgery
Author, Distinctive Phases Of Kali Carb. and Homeopathy , the medical stabilizer