Inside Out



There are two mentals, avaricious and vain. Take resentment, avarice, avarice, vanity, exhaustion, prostration out of all degree, and restlessness, waking at two in the morning, eczema and what have you? Arsenicum 200. (because she is fairly old), one dose.

She likes us. She is going to stay with us. She is telling the other doctors that we have helped her.

Case No. 5– Oh, the bane of my life, an eight-months-old baby from a horribly psoric family, Papa is a minister. I dont know why it is, but ministers children (I am one!) have tough lives. The baby was born excellently, everything under homoeopathic care, everything very fine, and suddenly Miss R. B. bloomed out with an eczema. She is a fat baby, weighs a ton when you pick her up-these little Calcarea babies! Her mother tells me that even at three and four months, If any paper was nearby, her fist was at it and she put it in her mouth, or she would chew the sheet- she would get anything she shouldnt eat.

Her face was just a bloody mask, though they kept her nails cut and filed. She was shocking. When they brought her in to me I said I had never seen anything so pathetic as this poor child. She was a great milk guzzler, a bottle baby. We stooped the milk and tried goats milk, and skim milk, and skim milk, and canned milk, and dry milk, and none of it made any difference. It wasnt the milk.

I gave her, just sort of desperately, a dose of Calcarea carb. 10M. It did something, but it didnt do much. After two or three weeks, the mother said, ” This isnt doing it.” The mother knows about Homoeopathy.

I said, “Tell me more-tell me more”.

She said, ” Her diapers are frightful. It is a thought I spilled the household ammonia on them.?”.

“Dose she take lots of water?”.

“Oh, she is an elegant guzzler. She drinks water; she drinks milk”.

“What else?”.

“Well, she seems to like everything fatty, that is one thing. And her poor little tail !”.

“Has she eczema around it?”.

“No, but it is all little cracks and hurts so awfully when I try to dry her”.

I said to myself, “Cracks on the tail, cracks on the face,. ammonia urine, a baby eight months old. Come up, Nitric-acid bottle”.

So I gave her a dose of Nitric acid. You would think that was a remedy for more mature people, but I had a child in my own family, of five, with frightful whooping cough and haemorrhages and Nitric acid cured him in twenty-four hours, so you never know. I gave Nitric acid, and the mother called up in the next ten days and said, “It was wonderful! she is fine”.

I though, “Aha, for a while, ” so the next week she called up and said, ” I must bring the baby in.” It was a Sunday. “She has glands as big as a house”.

I said, “Bring her in”.

She brought her in, and at first I thought she had the mumps. Her poor little carotids and cervicals were swollen and stony hard, not tender, not red, no sore throat. She could take lemon juice which, as you know, people with mumps cannot take. The glands in the groin were as big as a pullets egg and so the glands under the arm; blood count normal, no fever. Where do we go from here? I went to the Kent Repertory and I sweat blood, and I finally found I just had to give the child a dose of Conium 10M, one dose. The glands went steadily down. The child felt steadily better, and the eczema cleared up, and God knows why! I dont.

The end is not yet. That child is deeply psoric and will need to be doctored, as I told the mother, for at least another there or four years, but it is interesting. I learned from that that you must have given the indicated remedy even if it does not have one of the chief complaints. I think that may help you.

Case No. 6– There are the five cases and you are done with the skin, and now I will give you one case of the mind. I have a dear friend who loathes Homoeopathy and gave a building to a regular medical school. She had a child and when I looked at him some twenty years ago, I thought, ” If I could only give that baby a dose of Calcarea carb.” I talked to her as a friend and I said, ” Let me give that child a dose of his constitutional remedy”.

“Homoeopathy! I should say not !”.

I have watched that child socially. He has always been backward, subnormal, in and out of mental hospitals. He is the cross of the father and the mother, who love him dearly, and who try, ac- cording to their lights, to do their stuff, Finally she called me up professionally, last year, and she said, “You know, nearly twenty years ago, you told me homoeopathy would help that child, and I didnt believe you. I have tried everything else, and the mental hospitals tell me he is schizophrenic and I might as well institutionalize him, that there is no hope for him. Will you take him as a patient?”.

I said, “God is often late. Yes, bring him in”.

So he came in. He is a beautiful, blond, pink-skinned lad with strawberry-gold hair, glacial blue eyes handsome, slender, cultivated, neatly dressed-look like his mother. He was so nervous and fidgety he couldnt sit in a chair. He had me jittery just watching him, and yet at the phase there was nothing violent. He had had rather manic outbreaks in which they had to paraldehyde him and send him to a mental hospital; but now he was slow phased and If you asked him a question, he would look to his mother.

I said to her, “Please dont answer. I want his answer or nobodys answer”.

He sort of looked at me and slowly the interview progressed and he began to answer almost monosyllabically. His symptoms, as you can imagine, were hard to get. He wanted people. He didnt want to be left alone. He had studied a little-the A, B, Cs, which was all they felt he could do, writing and spelling, and saying 6 and 7 are 13, if his mother sat and watched him. If she went into the other room-nothing.

He stayed in the bathroom, I found out, for hours, with the door locked, and yet when I asked his mother if he masturbated or had any sexual difficulty, “Oh, no!” and I could hear her say, “In a ministers family!” (Laughter).

He had been having paraldehyde every night, 2 ounces, to sleep; otherwise they couldnt keep him at home, he would be prowling all night. “His father has to work. I have to work.” So I didnt say, “Stop the paraldehyde.” I thought, “Well, thank God, it is nothing else.” Paraldehyde is so disgusting, no one would take it if they didnt have to.

He was totally dependent but obviously vain, and neat. I know he was very jealous of normal, younger twin brothers, though he assured me he was very sweet to them and had never been the least bit jealous of them.

We gave this child, in July, 1952. Arsenicum 200. one dose. Gradually they were able to cut off the paraldehyde. She changed to bromides for him without asking me. I didnt fuss. Gradually the child got better and I said, “Lets have no more bromides unless he has a very bad night.” He went on from July of 1952 until april, 1953. His mother was nervous. She was afraid he might slide back, so I gave him one dose of Saccharum lactis through the interval, once every four months.

He is home all the time. She felt he was beginning to get restless again, so just before Easter she brought him in and I could see he didnt look quite as well as the last time, and I said, “Well, what is new, body ?”.

He said, “I want salt. I want salt”.

I looked at him, and he said, “I want to go see girls”.

Something new ! The nervous blond wants salt and wants to go see girls. Maybe something comes up, so I thought a little and I gave him a dose of Phosphorus 10M-so help me!-one dose, and I said to his mother, “If anything goes wrong in the next three or four days, dont you send him to any mental hospital. You telephone me”.

Sure enough, four days later she called me up in the middle of the night and said, ” He is off. He is gone. He is crazy”.

I said, “You mean he has gone out of the house?”.

“Oh, no, he is right here. I had to give him some paraldehyde”.

I said, “Think nothing of it. I gave him a remedy which has an aggravation at four days. Tomorrow or the day after tomorrow he is going to be better”.

So help me, I made an act of faith.

She said, “Do you really think so? You have helped me and I will believe you, but we cant old out through more than a day or two like this”.

I said, “If you cant hold out, I will get you a nurse, but dont send that child anywhere”.

Next day she called up and said, “How do you do? I know You told me on the fourth day he would raise Cain, and you told me by today he would be all right, and he hasnt been so well in twenty years”.

I said, “All right, I dont want to hear from you until he is. beginning to be worse. No Saccharum lactic this time”.

She brought him in the other day, two months later. He came in and said, “Mother, do you mind going out of the room?” He talked to me and said he was so well nowadays that daddy and mother were going to send him to a boarding school. I found out it was a school for rather difficult and abnormal boys, quite a wonderful place.

I said, “Are you happy to go?”.

He said, “I am looking forward to it. Maybe I can begin to live”.

Elizabeth Wright Hubbard
Dr. Elizabeth Wright Hubbard (1896-1967) was born in New York City and later studied with Pierre Schmidt. She subsequently opened a practice in Boston. In 1945 she served as president of the International Hahnemannian Association. From 1959-1961 served at the first woman president of the American Institute of Homeopathy. She also was Editor of the 'Homoeopathic Recorder' the 'Journal of the American Institute of Homeopathy' and taught at the AFH postgraduate homeopathic school. She authored A Homeopathy As Art and Science, which included A Brief Study Course in Homeopathy.