Part 57

Legs are restless; feel like stretching and moving them.

I feel very much as I did one time before having the ague, twenty-five years ago.

Odor from cooking is pleasing, but I have no desire for dinner. Yet when I sit down I eat a good dinner with relish.

Dizziness on rising from a reclining position.

Feel generally better after eating dinner.

Aching in the occiput.

During the afternoon leg weary.

Unusual hearty appetite for supper (the good appetite keeps with me for some days).

A good night's rest following, and have felt much brighter and generally better ever since the first day. (Healing.)

I have no doubt had I repeated the inhalations several times I should have been very sick. It is not necessary to push a proving to extremes. I think Hahnemann did not as a rule. If I were strong I should push this proving, but I dare not. Who will take it up?

(Apropos of the foregoing Dr. G. Hering, of England, made the following suggestions which hint at a possible use of the remedy in tuberculosis):

What curious discoveries are made by the observant! Witness the following remarks of Dr. Casanova, as recorded in the Homoeopathic Review of over thirty years ago:

"I know several localities in South America, Africa and Spain where the marsh miasma has unquestionably arrested and cured that fatal scourge of the human race, phthisis pulmonalis, without any other treatment or restriction in food or drink. And why should not the climate of the fen lands of Lincolnshire, in the neighborhood of Spalding, prove as curative an agent for this disease as the climate of so many foreign regions where patients go and die, deprived of all the comforts of a home? Penzance, among the British localities, is reported to be superior to nine-tenths of the places to which patients are sent. Penzance, then, and Spalding should be particularly studied by medical men and recommended to consumptive individuals who wish to enjoy the benefits and advantages of a national place of relief, if not of cure."

Upon reading this I began to reflect upon the limitless nature of science. We never seem to find either beginning or end to it. Circles within circles, and no one can tell what communications there are between those circles. We cannot trace them. We are lost in infinity.

Miasmatic places are the most healthy places--for some of us at least.

Now, I think of it, I find I can give some support to this statement of Dr. Casanova. I was once on board a Liverpool steamer which put into Aspinwall, on the swampy Isthmus of Panama, for nine days. Upon our return home several of the sailors, otherwise healthy fellows, were prostrated by what was called Panama fever, whilst I myself, who had formerly suffered from tubercular disease of the lungs, was totally unaffected.

MULLEIN OIL.

PREPARATION.--Fill a bottle with the blossoms from the Verbascum thapsus, cork tight, and hang in the sun for four or five weeks. By that time there will be an oily liquid distilled. Mix with ten per cent. of alcohol.

(Dr. A. M. Cushing introduced this now rather well-known remedy to the medical profession in 1884. He writes of it as follows):

The history of it is this: My father's house was the home for all poor tramps, as well as ministers, etc. He fell into the river, got water in his ears and was quite deaf for months. A blind man called, heard loud conversation, asked the cause, etc., then said for kindness received he would tell us how to make something that would surely cure him, and it was worth a thousand dollars in New York city. We made the oil, put it in his ears at night, and he was well in the morning. For years we kept a bottle of it, and it travelled all around the towns and did wonders. That was when I was a youngster. When I studied medicine, or when I was practicing, I wanted to know if it was homoeopathic, and made a proving, and developed the symptoms of almost constant but slight involuntary urination, keeping my pants wet.

I did not make any this past season, and have divided till I have but a little, half-and-half alcohol, left. I could spare a little of that, and next season, if I live, will try and make a quantity.

(The next item is from a letter of Dr. H. C. Houghton's, of New York, addressed to Boericke & Tafel.)

I have been much interested in the clinical study of this remedy--new, yet not new--but I have not succeeded in demonstrating what the symptom--deafness means in this case. Dr. Cushing does not claim to be an expert in this department, so time must help us out, and I am anxious to learn all I can of its effects on the ear.

In an old note-book of Dr. Hering's, Hearing and Ears, copied for me with the author's permission by my friend Dr. C. R. Norton, I noticed the following: "In Germany, flowers of Verbascum thapsus put in a dark-colored bottle, hung up in the sunlight, give in two or three weeks an oily fluid which has cured many old people and children." This method is impracticable, the amount produced being so small. Verbascum prepared in olive oil or fluid petroleum has the same effect as any oil; excellent in chronic disease of the integument; negative in middle ear disease. When your house brought out Mullein oil under Dr. Cushing's direction, I took it up again, and have prescribed it in a large number of cases. In chronic dermatitis of the external meatus and drum-head, or exfoliation after furuncle, it is excellent; in chronic catarrhal inflammation of the tympanum I have not been able to see any effect, but in chronic suppurative disease of the tympanum, or in accumulations of detritus in cases of perforation, scarred drum-heads, etc., it acts to dislodge accumulations, free the ossicula from pressure, and thereby improves the hearing; this process goes on for months till the tympanum has thrown out an amount of debris that is surprising. In a few cases it has caused soreness and increased muco-purulent discharge, due, I think, to excessive use.

My experience with it in chronic catarrh of the tympanum coincides with that of my friend, H. P. Bellows, M. D., of Boston, as published by him, but I purpose to continue the study of the drug, and hope for better results. In sub-acute or chronic disease after suppuration its effect is very gratifying; it aids exfoliation and checks irritation from exfoliated material.

I am able to confirm the symptoms noted of its effects in nocturnal enuresis in many instances. There is one effect I have not seen noticed by any observers: relief of night cough. More than ten years ago, Dr. H. A. Tucker, Brooklyn, N. Y., told me of a Glycerole of Mullein made by macerating the plant in Jamaica rum for two or three weeks, expressing it and adding to this product an equal quantity of glycerine. This led me to the use of the fluid extract of the plant, glycerine and water, equal parts, as a mollifier in cases where patients would resort to some popular remedy containing opium or similar opiate. The same effect can be produced by drop doses of Mullein oil, the teasing cough which comes on lying down, preventing the sleep usually yielding to a few doses.

(Dr. J. C. Wentz contributed the following bit of folk-lore):

The application of Mullein oil is of more general application than anything I have found in print. I report to you some cases: