50 Reasons For Being a Homeopath’ is a lovely little book. It consists of 50 letters from the famous homeopathic doctor J. Compton Burnett to a young skeptic ‘Dr T.A.K’ & was written around 1888. It still shines with truth today.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/50-Reasons-Being-Homoepath/dp/8131905934/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1282570075&sr=8-1-spell
Part 10:
You are quite mistaken in saying that what rendered me, after my “manner of speech”, a master of the healing art, is limited in it’s application. That is just what it is not, else where is the mastership? Getting a firm grip of the homeopathic law affords me a guide under almost all circumstances. Let me further exemplify my meaning by adducing a case of – CHRONIC HICCOUGH.
To begin with, if you have no experience with really bad cases of hiccough, ask your older partner, and he will tell you that they are very troublesome at times, and by no means easy to cure. And hiccough is again one of those cases that do not fit easily into any nosological system.
In the early part of 1883, a young lady was brought to me suffering from a number of morbid symptoms, the most promising of which was Singultus (hiccough). She would get it in attacks lasting about half an hour each, and of these there were generally four a day. In view of the comcomitants – emansion of the menses, leucorrhea, thirst, much saliva in the mouth – I considered that the hiccough was reflected from the uterus. You know something of the views I hold on vaccination and the theory of vaccinosis, which I have elsewhere sought to establish & defend. Well, I proceeded on these lines and gave Thuja, but it did no good. I followed with Sepia, which is a classic remedy with the homeopaths for leucorrhea, but it also did not help. What did I do? I went to the law of Homeopathy and to the prophet Hahnemann! Now my patient was thirsty; her tongue was coated; she had nausea; her mouth filled with fluid; she had headache; she yawned a good deal; she had hiccough; she complained of great weakness, and of fatigue in all her limbs; and altogether her symptoms were very much like those of Cyclamen, as given in Hahnemanns’s Materia Medica Pura, and THEREFORE if the old seers’s notion of similitudes was worth anything, Cyclamen ought to cure my patient, and so it did. The third decimal nearly cured her, but not quite; and so I went down to the second decimal when the menses appeared. But the second decimal dilution did not seem to act so well as the previously used third, and hence I harked back to the third. Then, as the hiccough was not quite well, I went down to the first decimal, and then for the same reason shot up to the thirtieth centesimal, when – repeat it only in a whisper to your friends – no more remedies were needed for the hiccough!
So please accept as my tenth reason for being a homeopath that fact that with its aid I can cure hiccough safely and pleasantly: this time the cure was wrought with Cyclamen.
Amazing!
I have had a patient as a supervision case for my supervision program at Misha Norland’s school, and she has the most troubling hiccough. She has other problems as well, of course, but obviously she goes to a conventional doctors, who have clearly told her – in this day and age – that conventional medicine has no cure for thi whatsoever! Here for the progress of conventional medicine… Where did you say this book was written? Around 1888, I see!
Thank you for this series!
EZ
Hi EZ,
You’re very welcome…I’m very glad someone finds it useful.
Very interesting about your patient, I had one with recurring bronchitis & a persistent cough that deteriorated… she was on steroid inhalers, antibiotics, all sorts of things. The poor lady was at her wits end & could feel she was deteriorating… all the doc could offer was, “ah, you have asthma now…take this”
Crazy crazy that they don’t see (seemingly obvious) patterns. There was a clear mental/emotional aetiology, IGN was give & all the symptoms just melted away.