For instance, an infant of seven months was brought to me last summer–incidentally, I had delivered the child–who had a well-marked eczema of the face, hands and body, but was apparently a perfectly healthy baby otherwise. The remedy worked out was Sepia, which did not seem to do any good at all. Of course, I felt that my stupidity might have been responsible for that, but still the record seemed to show that Sepia was the remedy, so, as a matter of interest, I had some skin tests done and found his youngster was sensitive to feathers, eggwhite, chicken, and a few things of that sort.
I felt that perhaps the feathers were particularly the offending substance, so we managed to get pillows and other things covered up and kept the youngster away from feathers, and after that she began to improve, and I saw her two weeks before I came down here, and she has no evidence to eczema at all and is very much better in her general health.
Something to which an individual is extremely allergic constitutes the hindrance to cure which Hahnemann asked us to recognize, and remove, in his third paragraph of The Organon.
Another instance is a young man with an extremely marked hay fever. When I first say him–he asked me to call at his place of business–the first thing I noticed before I even spoke to him, was the fact that he was working over a table and just streaming.
He used a box or two of Kleenex daily at his work, because of this profuse nasal discharge.
Well, to make a long story short, the remedy worked out by Boenninghausen was Sulphur. I think we used thirty-one rubrics, all of which Sulphur covered. That is a rather unusual thing, but Sulphur covered the complete picture, and this man got some benefit from Sulphur, but not enough. We then had him skin-tested and found he was sensitive to feathers 4-plus, house dust 4-plus, and a few other substances such as tuna fish, and crabmeat, and rabbit fur, and beef. By process of elimination we determined that the feathers were the chief offender and, with plastic pillow covers, his hay fever immediately began to improve, and since November he has had none. I believe that the removing of the feathers from his environment, as much as we could, gave the indicated remedy a chance to work; otherwise we would have gotten nowhere with him at all.
DR. EDWARD C. WHITMONT [NEW York, N. Y.]: I wish to apologize because I am going to take issue with that statement. I think we have to differentiate here between two things, palliation, because we are physicians, and curing, because we are homoeopaths. It is undoubtedly true that hypersensitivity to such substances will bring about disturbing symptoms and gain relief by removing the substances, but we have not dealt with an obstacle to cure because a patient is cured; as long as an ordinary mortal cannot stand feathers, he is not a normal human being in our sense. Our job and our possibility with homoeopathy lies in removing the allergy per se, in just making him so that he can stand feathers and dust.
How are you going to remove dust?.
I think it was at the meeting in Swampscott I reported the case of hairdresser with eczema who was sensitive to hair dyes. I have followed up this case over four or five years, and this man was skin-tested and sensitized, and he is continuing to use hair dyes and he is free, and his remedy also was a typical Sulphur remedy, for a Sulphur case, and the remedy was Tuberculinum.
Now, as to that particular case mentioned, in my own limited experience I have never seen Sulphur cure a hay fever case. In all Sulphur cases with hay fever you need a nosode, and it is usually Psorinum or Tuberculinum, and I would suggest, quite humbly, if you give Tuberculinum to your patient, he may be able to stand the feathers afterwards.
The same thing is true with children with eczema. Undoubtedly you can remove food items and get rid of the eczemas, but the child is not a normal child after that. He is still psoric, and he may not have eczema but he will develop abnormal conditions in later life because his allergic state has not been removed, though he is free of symptoms.
Again I may state that in order to get a breathing spell for the moment, we have to do it. It is a removal of an obstacle to cure, but just not a cure.
DR. ELIZABETH WRIGHT HUBBARD [New York, N. Y.]: I was just going to point out that the interesting thing is to make people able to cope with what they could not cope with before; for instance, I have a child in my practice who was skin-tested before she came to me and found to be terrifically sensitive to milk, and she was a very skinny little child, who should have had milk, and had not been able to take it for years.
Remembering what our President once said, a year or two ago, that Tuberculinum was practically specific for allergy against milk, I looked into the background of this childs family and found there was plenty of tuberculosis a couple of generations back, and I gave the child ascending potencies of Tuberculinum, and she now drinks a quart of milk, at least, a day, with gusto. We sent her back to the allergy specialist who tested her for milk, and he said there must have been some error because she is not sensitive to milk any more, and there is no cure for that allergy.
DR. ROGER A. SCHMIDT [San Francisco, Calif.]: If you will bear with me, I should like to bring up a point. I think Dr. Whitmont hit the nail on the head and I agree with him 100 per cent. For a long time now I have not sent my patients to specialists for skin testing because I notice that one year you send them and they will send a list of five, six, seven, or eight allergens, and the next year you send them and they have another list of ten or twelve. The allergies change from one thing to another. You have to go to the constitutional remedy to really do good work.
It is also true that nosodes are essential, but there is another angle brought out in the first case mentioned by Dr. Underhill, which has been very valuable to me, and I should like to pass the tip on if you are interested. This was at least twenty or twenty-five years ago when I was in Paris. I heard a very famous clinician, an allopathic man, by the way (and they give you some very good ideas sometimes).
He was a specialist in asthma, and he had found out in his work in Paris that in all cases of allergies, whether hay fever, asthma, colitis, or any part of the body where those allergies may be manifest, you also have an accompanying hypercholesteremia, and if you give those patients low cholesterol diet, you will get much quicker results and give them a great deal of relief, given the time and the chance for the homoeopathic remedy to do its work.
Of course, among the most noted item of foods of high cholesterol content is chocolate, and it is a policy of mine in every case of skin or hay fever allergy– or no matter what the allergy is –to stop the chocolate immediately, and also eggs, and also butter, and animal fats in a general way, things like sardines and salmon, things that are rich in animal fats,and invariably I have gotten some very, very good results from that until they overcome their difficulties.
DR. SUTHERLAND: I do not like to be put in the position of apparently not realizing the implications in a chronic case. I have spent quite a lot of time fiddling around with this stuff called homoeopathy and there is a lot of interesting material in it. I, too, fully believe, and am quite convinced, that an allergy is an expression of a very deep-seated, chronic constitutional disturbance, and I do not mean to say that if one avoids feathers, one is going to be cured of that–oh, no, but if you want to cure an addiction to morphine, you dont let the addict have morphine.
You have to withdraw it. It is an obstacle to cure. If a man is addicted to feathers, you have to remove the feathers. Then the homoeopathic remedy has a chance to operate and will then correct the underlying constitutional difficulty and eventually the man will be nonallergic.
That is the point I tried to get over, but in my stupidity I apparently did not.
DR. R. C. WOODHAMS [Mombasa, Belgian Congo]: The question of chocolate is interesting. I was surprised to find out that a nursing mothers eating chocolate affected the baby. I arrived in Iowa to visit my daughter and three grandchildren, whom I had not seen before, and, naturally, I took along a box of chocolates, but my daughter wouldnt touch them. She had discovered the week before when she had eaten a small piece of chocolate that the baby at once had pain, as well as a slight eruption; so my box of chocolates was popular with the rest of the family but not with my daughter!.
DR. T. K. MOORE [Sharon Center, Ohio]: It looks as though the eczemas respond to nosodes of one sort or another, I think I have already mentioned a case of ten years duration in an eleven-year-old boy, persistent and very disturbing to the eye and to the patient, from itching, and I didnt get anywhere with our regular procedure, but I found out that the mother had had the “flu.” She had it very severely a year and a half before the baby came, and Influenzin cleared the case.
Eugene passed away at his country home on Spring Hill, Tuscarora Township, Bradford County, PA. He had been in ill health for several months. His wife, the former Caroline Davis, whom he had married in Philadelphia in 1910, had passed away in 1961. They spent most of their marriage lives in Swarthmore, PA.
Dr. Underhill was a member of the United Lodge of Theosophy, a member of the Philadelphia County Medical Society, and the Pennsylvania Medical Society. He was also the editor of the Homœopathic Recorder.