DR. JAMES M. HEIMBACH: Just a little shy of fifty years ago when I started the practice of medicine, I took over my brothers practice for a month, and a patient came into my office who was covered with warts all over his back, over the dorsum of the hand, and I wasnt very proficient in my Materia Medica, of course, in those days, and I am still way behind Dr. Hubbard, but I knew that was a symptom of Thuja, and I gave the tincture of Thuja to put on the warts once or twice a day and occasionally take a drop of it internally.
I didnt find out how that worked out until about a year ago. He was a railroad man and he came through my town, and he remembered me and he came in to see me just purposely, you might say, to tell me about these warts, and he told me they had entirely disappeared in a very short time.
I must confess I never heard a better exposition of Thuja than these papers today, and thank you both very much.
DR. V. TABER CARR: I, too, am grateful for these papers. As we are on a warty subject, there is a case which comes vividly to my mind. About eighteen months ago, a patient was operated on in the hospital who had a very large, figlike wart over the angle of the left shoulder blade. This wart was about eight or ten inches in diameter.
I had seen the patient off and on. She was a dried-up, dirty brown woman, about five feet tall, very seclusive and short in her talk. Her relatives had given up visiting her for years because she had a mean word for them every time they said something. As it happened, she came to my service about January 1st of this year. Well, the result of the operation resolved itself into an irresolution of the field of operation. That field was discharging all the time. It had to be dressed for several months about four or five times a day.
I thought probably Thuja might cover her case, and I found it did I started her on the 10M, and that was the first of the year. To make it short, now she has gained weight, her complexion has cleared up. The relatives came to visit her about two months ago and they were surprised at the improvement in her mental condition. They had a very pleasant conversation together.
DR. ALLAN D. SUTHERLAND: That Thuja works externally as well as internally, and that it works internally as well as externally is illustrated by the two brief cases which I will state, the first case proving that Thuja works externally.
A ten-year-old Boston terrier owned by me developed a cauliflower growth on what would have been his chin if he had been a man. This was treated with tincture of Thuja, one drop applied three times a day for about six weeks. The progress toward cure was very interesting. The first thing that happened was that the growth increased. The second thing that happened was that the growth began to break down, to become necrotic; and the third thing that happened, it completely disappeared.
That Thuja will work internally as well as externally is illustrated by a widow of uncertain age, but definitely not younger than seventy, who showed me on the upper part of her left arm a very dark cauliflower growth. I was unable to obtain symptoms of any note in this woman and purely empirically prescribed Thuja, one dose of the two hundredth, with the result that in about three weeks time that growth was completely gone, never to reappear.
DR. BELLE P. NAIR: I am not going to talk about Thuja. I am going to ask this question: Is Thuja considered the only remedy to take away warts?.
SEVERAL MEMBERS: No !.
DR. NAIR: I wondered about that because my daughter at one time many years ago had a lot of warts on the inside of her hand, thirty warts on the palm of one hand. I tried several things and nothing did any good, but finally I began to give Baryta iodata, and at last there were no warts.
DR. HARVEY FARRINGTON: I want to answer the doctors question with one case. I suppose I have cured two hundred and fifty cases of warts on the soles of the feet, and I dont know how many on the nose, and elsewhere, but I never had but one on the vermilion of the lips– a little girl of eleven, and about the only characteristic symptom I could get was the fact that her face flushed easily. I gave her a dose of Ferrum, 1M. All those warts disappeared. Imagine the horrible results and suffering that would have resulted from having those warts burned off !.
DR. ALLAN D. SUTHERLAND: I should like to say that the subject matter of the paper read is Thuja. The discussion properly has been directed toward Thuja, and hence the conception might arise that Thuja is the only remedy for warts. Of course, it isnt. Any homoeopath knows that.
DR. A. H. GRIMMER [closing discussion]: I dont know that I can add any more to what was been said. The comment, of course, brought out some of the things that we ought to take notice of. I was going to say before I left that I hope that a lot of you wouldnt go out and give Thuja for every case of warts. There are a good many remedies you will have to compare. Nitric acid is one, and Causticum is another, and Calcarea is still another, and Natrum sulph. and Dulcamara. There are others, according to the character of the warts. More than anything else, be sure to get the patient in as a whole. Then you will clear the warts.
I saw a very definite result in a man that had a very disfiguring case, an aged patient of mine whom I had treated a long time for other conditions. I had helped him with his symptoms, those he complained about, but I will admit I didnt go carefully enough into his case, and finally one time he said, “Doctor, do you suppose you could do anything for this thing on my head ? The barbers and everybody else are commenting on it”.
It was a black, spotty area probably two inches in circumference, with a warty base, flat but warty, decidedly warty. I said, “I dont know, butt we can try. Sometimes we get results. I havent had much results with these things that look like moles but I have cured any amount of warts.” I gave him a 10M of Thuja, and in less than a month he was as smooth and as perfect as he was the day he was born. He had no more or that growth at all, and his friends couldnt get over it when he told them he had a little powder on his tongue from a homoeopathic doctor, and they refused to believe him. They said be had had some x-ray or some material means used to take it off.
Now, there is one thing more ! I wanted to bring up this external-internal application of remedies to warts. I believe that it can be done, but I think that the application of the remedy Thuja to the wart externally is just as bad as burning it off with Nitric Acid. We have seen plenty of effects from the suppression of warts with Nitric Acid. I believe that perhaps some of the “jam” was taken off by the internal action of the remedy given at the same time. I dont believe it is wise. I think if you use just the internal remedy, you will be much better off.
DR. ELIZABETH WRIGHT HUBBARD [closing discussion]: I just want to say that while we are discussing Thuja, I wish we wouldnt discuss E.W.H. I appreciated tremendously the erudition in Dr. Grimmer s paper. He had any number of symptoms, forty of them that I had never known or heard of, and I will restudy that paper when it comes out in The Recorder.
I thank you all for your kindness and I hope you will carry home one thought, you younger men, and that is to try to dig out of innumerable books and your small experience, a living internal image of every remedy, a picture such as I tired to give you today, of one of the remedies which does not lend itself to a mental picture or inner image image easily, as some of the others do. It is like that in a friendship. Nobody can remember all the symptoms, but anybody can remember an old friend.
In his book The Collected Works of Arthur Hill Grimmer, Grimmer spoke out against the fluoridation of water and vaccinations. Grimmer wrote prodigeously, Gnaphalium, Homeopathic Prophylaxis and Homeopathic Medicine and Cancer: The Philosophy and Clinical Experiences of Dr. A.H. Grimmer, M.D.