Gelsemium sempervirens

Dull, heavy pain. Complete relaxation of the whole muscular system. Languor; muscles feel bruised. Every little exertion causes fatigue. Pain in neck, especially upper sterno-cleido muscles. Dull aching in lumbar and sacral region, passing upward. Pain in muscles of back, hips, and lower extremities, mostly deep-seated.

Well-known streets seem strange : way home too long. Disinclined to speak ; would hardly answer. A distinct feeling of pulse in head. Throbbing in front of head. Immediately a sensation as if head were too large. Head felt enormously large. Pressure and throbbing in temples. Pressure and pain from 'within out in both temples. Fullness in head, and throbbing without pain. Head very full : pulse full and quick. As if the blood were mounting to head. As if he were hanging with head downwards, and as if there were a great rush of blood into head in consequence. As if skull were too small ; and brain attempting to burst it. Afraid tó shake his head lest it drop to pieces. Holds head with both hands ; presses sinciput. Shocks in brain, synchronous with every pulsation of arteries. GLONOINE—NITRO-GL YCERINE Undulating sensation in head. Throbbing in head : in temples : in temporal arteries which were raised and felt like whipcords. Sensation of fullness, vertex and forehead. Shaking the head increases the headache. Headache on damp, rainy days ; after taking cold ; after much sitting, and mental exertion. Red injected hot eyes during headache, with wild expression. Throbbing pain in all the teeth. Throbbing in whole body. Intense congestion of brain induced in plethoric constitutions by sudden suppression o f menses, or appearing instead of menses. Headaches occurring after profuse uterine hœmorrhage. Rush of blood to head in pregnant women, with pale face and loss of consciousness. Violent palpitation of heart, with .throbbing carotids, pulsating headache in forehead and between temples. Blood seems to rush to heart and mount rapidly into head. Epileptic convulsions, with congestion to head and heart. Bad effects from being exposed immediately to sun’s rays. {In fever) flushes of heat : waves of heat upwards. Other, Italic, or Queer Symptoms Recognized no one. Raved ; screamed ; wishes to rush from house. Jumped out of bed, but legs gave way. Fears : throat swollen ; chest as if screwed together ; of approaching death ; of having been poisoned. Bad effects of fear, fright, mechanical contusions and their later consequences. Could not allow head to be level with body. Confusion of ideas : could not tell where he was. Loss of location : (a cured case), began ten years ago ; loses himself in streets he has travelled in for years. All right in regard to everything else. In familiar street everything strange. Had to look about him every few minutes to convince himself he was in the right street. Houses not in their right places, on the route he had traversed at least four times a day for four years. Convulsions, falls down frothing at mouth, after alternations of palpitation of heart and congestions to the head. Congestion to head, causes sensation of coldness every time. Tight and choky feeling throat, like strangulation. Skull too small ; as if brain attempting to burst skull. As if head and neck laced in : clothing too tight. GLONOINE—N1TR0-GLYCERINE Pain in wens on scalp, as of a thimble pressed firmly on them. Every motion, side to side, increased the pain (in head), but motions backward and forward did not. Headache : ceases in sleep : better in open air : lessened by drinking coffee, after a few hours : tea lessens it better. Feels as if ice-cold sweat were on forehead, which is not there. Rays of sun on head were not to be borne, and head would not allow hat to touch it. Frightful headache : runs about room with head pressed between hands. As if head would burst : knocks it against wall. Hyperæmia of brain caused by excessive cold or heat. Bad consequences of cutting hair. Sunstroke. Said her éÿes were falling out : felt as if someone were pulling them from within outwards. Letters seem smaller : flashes of lightning, sparks, mist or black spots, whirling and confused vision. Wild, staring look : protrusion of eyes. Supra-orbital neuralgia, from 6 a.m. to n or 12. Cold sweat on face during congestion to head. Lower lip feels swollen. Numbness lower lip. Chin feel elongated to knees : obliged to put hand to chin repeatedly to be sure this was not the case. (Prover had injured chin by a fall twenty years before.) Tongue numb as if burnt ; prickling, stinging. .Constriction in throat as if throttled. Wine aggravates all symptoms : alcoholic stimulants cause delirium, congestion, stupor. Seasickness. Faint, warm sickening sensation in chest and stomach, like threatening seasickness Giddiness. Disturbances in intercranial circulation at menopause. Flushes, etc., during climacteric. Violent palpitation : feeling she would die : numbness whole of left arm. Pressure at heart as if it were being contracted. Alternate congestion to heart and to head. “ As an intercurrent in angina pectoris, to prevent organism from getting accustomed to influence of Aur. mur.” Hot sensation down back ; burning between scapulæ. Old contusions and jars (to head and spine). Knees give way in headache. Unsteady gait. Knees and thighs knock together during headache. Convulsions, with clenching and jerking upwards of fists and legs. During spasms spreads fingers and toes apart. GLONOINE—NITRO-GLYCERINE Convulsions, with especially left fingers spread apart. Cannot protrude tongue in a straight line. Restless sleep : wakes with fear of apoplexy. Congestions ; blood tends upwards : vessels pulsate ; veins, jugular, temporal, enlarged. Rapid deviations in distribution of blood. Useful as a sub­ stitute for bleeding. Bad effects from mental excitement, fright, fear, mechanical contusions and their later consequences, from having hair cut, and from exposure to rays of sun. Antidoted by acon., Camph., Coffea, Nux. Compare Amyl n itr ., Bell., Ferr., Gels., Natrum curb., Potas. nitr., Sod. nitr.. Stram. As seen from above, the action of Glonoine, so local, so sudden, so definite, so alarming and torturing, and therefore so remedial is, once grasped, impossible to forget. In fact, it seems hardly worth writing about ! However we will run through what some of our great prescribes and w rites have to say about it. This one emphasizes one point coinciding with his experience, that one another ; and so one learns. H u g h e s writes : "The name Gionoin was formed by its intro­ ducer into medical practice, Dr. C. Hering, out of the chemical formula (G10 NO5) denoting its composition. Dr. Hering proved it on himself and others in 1848. ...” Hughes says, "the action of Gionoin lies within a very small compass. If any one will touch his tongue ith a 5 per cent, solution, he will pretty certainly find in a few minutes that his pulse has increased by twenty, forty or even sixty beats. He may feel a throbbing all over his body, but will almost always experience it in his head, which will go on beating until a pretty violent bursting headache has developed itself. With this, there will be probably some giddiness, a sense of fullness in the head and at the heart, and one of constriction about the throat. . . . All this reminds us of Amyl nitrite : . . . but the effects of the two drugs are not identical. Amyl causes a general flushing without marked sense of throbbing . . . nor is the pulse much affected by it. It seems to have been demonstrated that Amyl produces its dilating effects on the arteries by directly paralysing their muscular coats . . . while Gionoin affects the nervous centres of the circulation, and is limited to this sphere.” Then he distinguishes between the action of G Ion. and Bella­ donna. " With Bell., the circulation within the cranium is excited because the brain is irritated ; with Glon., the brain is irritated GLONOINE—NJ. TRO-GL YCERINE because the circulation is excited. It would be indicated in such hyperaemia as can be produced by excessive heat or cold, by strong emotions, by mechanical jarring, by suppression of the menses or other haemorrhages and excretions.” He evidences not only sunstroke, but the striking benefit he has obtained from the drug in the distressing after-effects of sunstroke. He says, ” perhaps the greatest boon which Dr. Hering has conferred upon patients in introducing Glon. to medicine is the relief it gives to menstrual disturbances of the cerebral circula­ tion , as the intense congestion of brain induced in plethoric constitutions by sudden suppression of the menses. Glonoin is an exquisite similimum here : for in one of Dr. Dudgeon’s provers, who took it while the catamenia were present, these immediately ceased, and the headache went on increasing in violence till night. . . . It does not, like Lachesis or Amyl nitrite, act on the flushings of the climacteric ; but is most valuable when these are localized in the head.” He says, ‘‘it was the statement of its discoverer, Sobrero, that ' even a very small quantity placed on the tongue causes a violent headache of several hours’ duration ’, which led Dr. Hering to investigate its action. ...” The kind of headache—fullness, tension, throbbing, bursting— these are the phrases used by the provers to describe it. . . . It acts as rapidly in disease as in health. He discusses its striking power of relieving paroxysms of neuralgia, even in some cases, permanently curing. Guernsey epitomizes Glonoine, and its uses. “ Troubles from heat of the head in type-setters, in men who work under a gas-light steadily, so that heat falls on the head : bad results from sunstroke ; can’t bear any heat about the head ; can’t walk in the sun, must walk in the shade or carry an umbrella ; can’t bear heat from a stove ; great vertigo from assuming an upright posture from rising up in bed, rising from a seat. Heat in head ; throbbing headache.” Patient feels lost, or strange even in familiar street or sur­ roundings. Things look strange and unfamiliar. Nash. One of our great head medicines. He says he used to carry Glon. I in his case, for those inclined to sneer at the young doctor and his sweet medicine. He seldom failed to convince, in five to ten minutes, that there was power here : for a drop on the tongue produced thecharacteristic throbbing headache. No one ever asked for more proof of the power of homoeopathic medicine. (One remembers a young woman doctor at the ” New ” , as the GLONOINE—NITRO-GL YCERINE Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital was then called, who described the terrible headache from touching her tongue with some prepara­ tion of nitro-glycerine.) The pains of Belladonna are sudden in onset, and suddenly gone : those of Glonoine are even more so. Nash says that “ Glonoine is better adapted to the first, con­ gestive stage of inflammatory diseases of the brain : Belladonna goes farther, and may still be the remedy after the inflammatory stage is fully initiated.” Neither can stand the least jar. But pain “ waves ” upsurging, are absolutely characteristic of Glon. Farrington emphasizes that the keynote to the whole symptomatology of the drug is expressed in this one sentence : ” a tendency to sudden and violent irregularities of the circulation.” With that, he says, we can easily work out the other symptoms. ” Glon. is a drug that acts very quickly and very violently ; the throbbing (head) is not a mere sensation, it is an actual fact. It really seems that the blood vessels would burst, so violent is the action of the drug. . . . The blood seems to surge in one great current up the spine and into the head. The external jugulars look like tortuous cords, the carotids throb violently and are hard, tense and unyielding to pressure. The face is deep red. This throbbing is either associated with dull, distressing aching, or with sharp, violent pains.” " Sunstroke . . . also we find Glon. to be our best remedy for the effects of heat, whether the trouble arises from the direct rays of the sun, from hot weather, or from working in the intense heat of a furnace, as in the case of foundrymen and machinists. These effects are not confined to the head, but involve the whole body, and we note oppression of breathing, with palpitation of the heart and nausea and vomiting . . the nausea not gastric, but cerebral . . . a horrible, sunken feeling in the epigastrium and often, too, diarrhoea. . . . Eyes too large and protrude as though bursting out of the head . . . eye diseases from exposure to very bright light . . . blood vessels of retina distended, or, in extreme cases, apoplexy of the retina. . . . Admirable remedy for puerperal convulsions : full, hard pulse, and albuminuria. . . “ Well-known streets seem strange to the patient (Petroleum). Suppose a person, subject to apoplectic congestions, is suddenly seized in the streets with one of these, and does not know where he is, then Glonoin is the remedy for him.” ” Bad effects of fear {Opium). Horrible apprehension, and sometimes the fear of being poisoned.” GLONOINE—NITRO-GL YCERINE “ Then, trauma. An excellent ren .y for pains and other abnormal sensations, following late after local injuries : the part pains, or feels sore ; or an old scar breaks out again.” He, also, contrasts Bell, and G Ion. “ because they meet in the congestions and inflammations of the brain with children and old persons. They divide the honours here.” Bell. Glon. Cri encéphalique. Less marked.* Worse bending head backwards. Better bending head backwards. Head feels enormously large. Better for uncovering head. Better open air. Better from covering head. Wè will end by extracting some of Kent’s most graphic little flashes; even where there is repetition, that merely serves to em­ phasize and drive the facts in. “ Surging of blood to heart and head. As if all the blood in the body were rushing round the heart : a surging in head ; a warm, glowing sensation in head ; or intense glowing from stomach or chest up to head, at times with loss of consciousness. . . . Wave-like sensations, as if skull were lifted and lowered ; expanded and contracted. Intense pain, therewith, as if head would burst. Great throbbing : beating of hammers ; every pulsation painful. Even fingers and toes pulsate. . . .” “ Head is relieved in open air: worse in warmth, often relieved by cold. Worse lying. Worse head low. Extremities cold, pale and perspiring, head hot, face flushed and purple or bright red. Mouth dry; eyelids dry, stick to eyeballs. All degrees of confusion to unconsciousness.” “ Sunstroke . . . sudden congestions of head. . . . Cold feels good to head ; heat feels good to extremities. When lower limbs are covered with clothing in a cool room, and windows open; convulsions are relieved, and patient breathes more easily.” “ In apoplexy, such medicines as Opium and Glonoine relieve the blood pressure when the symptoms agree. . . . They equalize the circulation, and the patient may not die.” “ If sitting up, you will often see a Glonoine patient with both hands pressing upon the head with all the power possible until the arms are perfectly exhausted. Wants it bandaged, or a tight cap. . . . Worse from wine, and worse from lying down. You will be astonished to know how long a Glonoine patient will sit without moving a muscle, because motion is so painful. Whole crown of head feels as if covered by a hot iron, as if an oven were close by ....................”