This child has gained steadily, and there was an operation which maybe would have been completely unnecessary if I had been called in sooner.
DR. BOGER SHATTUCK: Sometimes I gave used Kali mur. especially if in your pneumonias Pulsatilla doesnt work as quickly as you think it should, or in cases quite similar. I think Kali mur. is a remedy that you shouldnt neglect investigating, at least. I have had very unusual experience in that this winter.
A child was brought to my office in extremis, has been treated by several other physicians, but was brought to me because of vomiting and had diarrhoea. She was white and looked as though she might die while she was on the table, while I was examining her, and she had both ears running. I looked at her quite carefully and gave her Arsenicum CM. and sent her home, and, to my amazement, the third day, they brought the child back sucking a milk bottle full of milk, with more color in her face; but right here, pointing behind the left ear-it was, well, larger than a pigeons egg. I put a lance to it, barely nicked the skin, and from which we got almost a cup of yellow pus. Ordinarily I wouldnt have done it in the office, but I though I was going to break it with my fingernail in examining it.
That drained for perhaps three days, and I gave this child a dose of Tuberculinum, and she is a husky little now, following that.
There was another case of ear condition which I was called upon to treat. This woman came to me with a hydrops of the gallbladder. She was in such pain that we had her operated, and the gallbladder removed, but she immediately came down with a colitis, which several good men tried to cure, because she was a summer patient and she started the colitis treatment, and went thence to Philadelphia, and went to St. Petersburg, and was treated in the wintertime, came back next summer, still with the colitis.
I took the case again very carefully and on examination I said, “You have a running ear”.
She said, “Didnt you know that, Doctor?”.
I said, “No, I am sorry to say I didnt.
She said, “I have had that stinking ear for fifty years, and Dr. Guernsey treated me for that and said I never would be cured”.
I gave her one potency, 10M., of Sulphur, and cured the colitis and the ear. She is well to this day, because I saw her a few days ago.
DR. GRIGGS: I want to congratulate the doctor on his clinical confirmations. I probably do not see the meaning of the research. All I see is clinical confirmations.
This reproving and so-called research work, in my fifty years of homoeopathy is nothing but a joke. What I call research work is getting hold of something new and proving it, and and giving it as a tool to work with, because the only research in homoeopathy for anyone within this room or anywhere else-is proving of new substances to give us new efficient tools to help cure the sick, and I havent heard it here.
Now, this running ear, I, of course, have, seen it wholesale in my hospital work. I had a little girl that had the flu four years ago and was brought to the hospital. She had a continuous otitis since that time and when she was brought in had an otitis with some cerebral symptoms, such as rolling of the head, grating of the teeth, and a squint, and a discharge from the ear, a thin, watery, a curdy discharge, and very offensive, occasionally curdy.
I could have said the neurological finding was rigidity but there was no Babinski, and so forth, and I did a cysternal tap, and I got a clear fluid, but with an increased amount of cells, about seven hundred cells. This case was practically emaciated. I gave one dose of Tuberculinum one thousandth potency, and in a few days that ear ceased running. It has been running for four years and three weeks. The child left the hospital free from all neurological signs, in three weeks, and was perfectly well. That was done with Tuberculinum, one dose.
My idea of research work, as I have said, is to bring us some new tools. Where are your efficient remedies in cancer or tuberculosis today? How much would you do if you could cure cancer or tuberculosis? This island of Atlantic City wouldnt be big enough for the sanitarium.
We have to go out and get things. The doctor spoke of the premature and newborn. This is my conception of research work, so criticize me, and that is what I am here for. There was an infant born, and it was lethargic, as you will find them, with a little squeak, a grunt in breathing, some cyanosis, and it was thought there was an atelectatic lung. There is atelectasis in every newborn baby no matter why. I have been in the newborn ward too many years, and I have had hundreds and hundreds of x-rays taken, and this child showed evidence of cerebral injury.
I tapped the ventricle of this brain and got some bloody fluid. The child was still lethargic. I gave a dose of Arnica, and from the x-ray, which was very carefully taken, there was evidence of a little rent near the inferior or the superior tentorium, but Arnica didnt clean that case up.
Now, there are some great things in this world to proven, and the greatest substance, one of the great substances, has never been touched on by the Homoeopathic fraternity, much to the disgrace of our colleagues, because they havent given me any new tools to work with for years. All the new things I have is what I worked out myself; so we know through the vegetable kingdom all over the world, probably the greatest element distributed in all plants is starch, and there are only three places: amylum, inulin, and glycogen, and no man, as far as I know, has proved starch. That is something new.
Well, I have been working for some years on amylum, inulin, and glycogen, and I gave this child the 100 potency, and it happened to be the only potency I had and it happened to be the old Fincke potentizer, and I gave three doses of inulin, the 1000 potency, and inside of twenty-four hours the child brightened right up and began to nurse, and all these children who have cerebral or haemorrhagic tendencies and are apathetic and lethargic, will not nurse.
I cleared that child up perfectly in less than the orthodox time, with inulin, one of the starches, and I have found it most efficient, and I produce sore symptoms in the human body, as sore as Arnica ever produced. That is my idea of research work, going into these simple substances, even to the vital economy and give me new symptoms and new tools to work with, when my orthodox Materia Medica doesnt help me out, not the reproving and rehashing of the same old drugs-and I havent seen a modern proving that compares with a proving of Hahnemann yet.
I may be narrow-minded of near-sighted, and I may be waked up, but I am telling you what I have seen from fifty long years of experience in homoeopathy and working with good men, since 1895, working with Kent till he left Philadelphia, and Walter James, who was an A-1 prescriber, and Augustus Korndoerfer, the great student of Hering, to the day of scriber, and Augustus Korndoerfer, the great student of Hering, to the day of his death. That is my idea of research, not clinical confirmation of old, well-proven remedies.
I have to stand on my own feet.
DR. GUTMAN: In the monotonous stuff it is always the same and we know it all, but I am working in a so-called Homoeopathic college, where allopathy is practiced, and I was quite successful in interesting students and doctors alike again in homoeopathy. Then I was told, and this is a sort of homoeopathic research, to do statistics to prove, and then I agree 100 per cent thoroughly with you, Dr. Griggs, that the most important point in homoeopathy is research, is proving.
You may have overheard that I enumerated five points the research is doing and the first one is the proving done already by about twenty provers, with some material that is very promising, only clinically used, and I will be only too glad if some or many of you will come and say, “Now I want to participate to complete this proving,” with which I want to start. It would be wonderful if we set up a committee later on for proving, but not only debating the proving and the question of proving, but only do it. I also consider it a most important thing in other research.
