We want the women in the Institute. We need them as provers. They can make provings that none of the rest of us can make, or can even superintend. That argument brought them into the Institute, and it was my pleasure to put the question when they were admitted, and I shall be proud of it if I live a hundred years.
I am glad this subject has been discussed, because it is shown to-day that it, like every other, has two sides, and that people may be very honest in their views on either side, that we grow and learn by contact, by coming together and comparing our experiences.
I believe most heartily in the efficacy of Homoeopathic remedies for many diseases of women. I am perfectly satisfied that the scope of the remedies will grow and the utility increase as time goes on, will learn how to apply them; and that just in such ratio, the coarser, cruder and apparently more cruel surgical means that we have to resort to now, will be used less and less. Upon the other hand I believe that surgical measures in the right hands, guided by the right brains, are useful and will always be useful in this specialty.
I cannot hear any reflection upon gynaecologists as a class, I mean the better ones, without a little bit of resentment. What under heaven would we have known of gynaecological diagnosis without the gynaecologists, and what would our testimony be good for as to the efficacy of HOmoeopathic remedies if we were not competent to make a careful diagnosis? Therefore I say we need the gynaecologists. We cannot be good theoretical gynaecologists until we are good diagnosticians.
There are two sides to this question, and when we are interested in one we are apt to forget the other. I could not help recalling the story told by Henry Ward Beecher about the old dark fished all day, and toward the end of the day caught a catfish. He threw it back into the water disgusted and said, “When I goes catting, I goes catting; but to-day I’se piking”.
We must be careful not to insist too radically on our experience as being all one way, or all the other. Let us be well balanced, well poised, and then our experience, and what is more, our advice, will be worth something.
ALFRED E. HAWKES, M.D., Liverpool, England: I should like to add my testimony, and I cannot say how delighted I am to hear these experience of opinion. My position is just in a nutshell. I believe firmly and sincerely in our medicines, and I try as far as possible to put off an operation. I have now several cases that come to my clinic at home where the ovaries and what not have been condemned by operation, where I have been able to give medicines and get a cure.
I have had the happiness of talking to a good man, a very excellent friend of mine of the other School of medicine, who declared that whereas an operation in his opinion was necessary and called for on a previous occasion, now no such necessity existed. I thin that such medicines as Palladium and Apis, with Stannum to come after Sepia, when the Sepia is not quite efficacious, will do a great deal with these cases, and that operations will become fewer and fewer as we understand the possibilities of our Materia Medica better.
I am glad to be told that so many ladies are practicing medicine, and I am sure the greatest possible good will come to all from their combination with us of the sterner sex.
C.C. HIGBEE, M.D: I can endorse everything said in the paper of Dr. Phillips. There is one remedy which I believe to be Homoeopathic in its action, which I have found very efficacious in treating this class of diseases, which has not been mentioned. I believe the action of electricity in gynaecological cases is Homoeopathic. I have had quite a large experience for several years in the use of electricity in these cases, and with excellent effect.
It is difficult to say at the present time with our limited- I think I will say-“proving” of electricity, just how it acts, but I believe it is through the nervous system, and that it re- establishes the capillary circulation which is at the base of most of these diseases. I know from the experience that I have had with it that it clears up many of those cases much more rapidly than I could possibly do with any drug that I have ever administered. Perhaps I did not select the proper drug or give it in a potency high enough, but I did the best I could. But before we give up our cases let us thoroughly try electricity.
FLORA A. BREWSTER, M.D.: The doctor who has preceded me has stolen a part of my thunder. I shall have to begin where he left off. I believe a chief cause of the troubles which we gynaecologists treat in our offices is uterine oedema. I believe that in all the misplacements that we are called upon to deal with, if we could get the patient in time and could restore the muscular tone, we could prevent the misplacements.
Unfortunately, we never get them under our care until the person is crippled, and I believe it is an absurdity to attempt, when all the blood vessels are out of place, when the blood easily passes into the organ and it is almost impossible for it to escape, when waste matter is left in it and the organ is growing heavier, to restore that organ by medicines alone. Why should not we, as Homoeopathists, use the very best means in our power to gain all the knowledge we can in restoring the human body? I believe if we would do that, very much of the opprobrium that is heaped upon the head of the poor Homoeopathist might be averted. And I believe that one of the most effective means we have in restoring uterine tone is electricity.
Doctors have said to me: “oh, the worst cases I have ever seen have been women that have been to an electrician.” It is because they did not know how to use the battery. How many doctors are there that know what a current of tension means, or the difference between a current run through a long fine wire and one run through a coarse heavy wire? You will get exactly opposite effects. One kind will decrease the inflammation and the other will increase it.
I know positively that a uterus, retroverted and imbedded in a mass of adhesion, can have a current passed through it with perfect safety, and these adhesions can be broken up and the uterus lifted to its normal position. Not in one treatment, or three, or five. It needs a person of good judgment and large experience.
DR. PHILLIPS: I see very little reason for occupying more time. Nothing has been developed which makes me wish to express a different opinion or add to what I have said. The use of local remedies and internal medication goes without saying. The same indications which lead to the local use of Belladonna would lead to the internal administration of the same drug, and the internal remedy in my experience is almost always identical with the local.
In regard to Sepia, I would like Dr. Cowperthwaite to know that there is one gynaecologist in the United States that carries Sepia in his case, for I never go without it. I use it, not to replace a displaced uterus which has been impacted, but to strengthen the ligaments after it has been mechanically replaced.
J.M.LEE, M.D.: It was stated by one of the speakers that electricity in some way or another was sufficient to break up or to cure all cases of so-called pelvic cellulitis, and that if such diseases were not cured by the application of electricity it was because the operator did not understand the use of the agent. There are cases of adhesions that cannot be broken up with the fingers, and it is absurd for anybody to get up before an audience like this and state that electricity can cure those cases. I want to protest against any such talk as that.
DR. HIGBEE: I haven’t heard any one say that electricity could break up those adhesions. I do not believe they can be so broken up. It will stop their growth.
