Veratrum album

Sinking and empty feeling. Cold feeling in stomach and abdomen. Pain in abdomen preceding stool. Cramps, knotting abdomen and legs. Sensation as if hernia would protrude (Nux). Abdomen sensitive to pressure, swollen with terrible colic.

and Hering). Persistent raging. Inconsolable over a fancied misfortune, runs about the room hauling and screaming, looking upon the ground ; or sits brooding in a corner, wailing and weeping in an inconsolable manner. Taciturnity. Crossness, when cause given. Attacks of pain with delirium, driving to madness. Mania with desire to cut and tear everything, especially clothes ; with lewdness and lascivious talk : religious or amorous. Delusions of grandeur. Cold sweat on forehead with anguish and fear of death. Despair of salvation with suppressed catamenia. His consciousness is as if in a dream. Flat-pressing headache, vertex : which became throbbing when moving. Sensation of a lump of ice in vertex. Cold sweat on forehead. Pale face : sunken : with anxious expression. He became pale in the face with frequent stools. He cannot speak. Saliva runs incessantly out of mouth like water brash. Tasteless saliva want of taste in mouth. Taste and coolness in mouth, as from peppermint. Pungent peppermint taste in throat : sensation of heat rises into the mouth. Thirst for coldest drinks. Craves ice : fruit. Violent hunger. Excessive thirst during perspiration. Great thirst with hunger. Great nausea before vomiting. Violent vomiting of slimy, acid liquid, with food. Forcible, excessive vomiting. Vomiting and diarrhoea as many as ten times, with pale sunken face, covered with cold sweat. Vomiting of green mucus. Gastric catarrh, great weakness : cold, sudden sinking. Colic, as if intestines twisted into a knot. Cold feeling in abdomen. Colic with burning, as if intestines twisted into a knot, with cold sweat. Cutting pains : flatulent colic, which attacks the lower bowels here and there and the whole abdomen : the longer the flatus is retained, the more difficult it is to be expelled. Diarrhoea with profuse perspiration. Frequent and violent diarrhoea : very profuse and painful. Excessive evacuations : copious evacuations. Constipation on account of the hardness and size of the evacuations. Cholera morbus : worse at night : cold sweat on forehead ; vomit­ ing and purging at the same time, after fruits : profuse brownish discharges : thirst : cramps : prostration : cold sweats : great weakness after stool. Asiatic cholera . . . violent evacuations upwards and downwards : icy coldness of body : cramps in calves : vomiting with constant desire for cold drinks : face colourless or bluish : bine margins round eyes : deathly anguish in features : cqld tongue and breath : great oppressive anguish in chest, with desire to escape from bed : violent colic, especially about umbilicus, as if abdotnen would be torn open : sensitive to contact : drawing and cramps, fingers : wrinkled skin in palms : retention of urine. Palpitation of heart with great anxiety and quickened audible respiration. »55 Excessive anxiety that takes away the breath. Spasmodic constriction of larynx with contracted pupils. Suffocative attacks of constriction in larynx. Deep hollow cough in three or four shocks. Seems in danger of suffocation, the respiration is so restricted. Cold breath (in cholera). Hands icy cold, blue. Blue nails. Rheumatic pain, feU when moving. . . . Very great difficulty of walking, like paralysis, first right then left hip-joint. Pain under knee, as if bone had been broken and was not quite firm. Heavy pain of legs, as from fatigue. . . . Prostration and weakness of the whole body : extreme weakness. Syncope. Yawning. Paralytic sinking of strength. Whole body and face pale. ChUl and shivering with frequent stools. Febrile chill with coldness and thirst. Creeping coldness through whole body. Cold skin. Creeping coldness over head, especially vertex. “ Lump of ice ” sensation, vertex. Face told, collapsed. Coldness back : extremities cold. Great coldness of hands. Cold sweat. Cold sweat on forehead. Profuse perspiration on forehead with the evacuation. Cold perspiration over whole body. Typhoid forms of fever when vital forces sink : cold sweat : coma. Vomiting and watery diarrhoea : bluish face : pointed nose : wrinkled skin. Internal chill ran through him from head to toes of feet with thirst. Hahnemann gives also, heat and redness of face. Among the peculiar sensations of Verat. alb. we find : As if pregnant, or in throes of childbirth. As if he had a bad conscience and had committed a crime. As if a lump of ice on vertex. As if tongue too heavy. .-4 s if peppermint—coolness—in mouth and throat. A s if something alive were rising from stomach into throat. As if knives cutting bowels : hot coals in abdomen : pinching as with pincers in abdomen : intestines twisted into a knot. Cold water running through veins. Bones pressed or broken. As if a heavy stone were tied to feet and knees. As if she would have to fly away. Veratrum, then, has mania, insanity, delirium, all of great violence. Kent condenses these far more tellingly than one can hope to do, so we will quote. He says : “ The mental symptoms are marked by violence and destruc­ tiveness : he wants to destroy, to tear something ; he tears the clothes from his body. Always wants to be busy, to carry on his daily work. A cooper who was suffering from the Veratrum insanity would pile up chairs on top of one another : when asked what he was doing, he replied that he was piling up staves. When not occupied with this he was tearing his clothes, or praying ” (Stram.) " for hours on his knees, and so loud that he could be heard blocks away. “ Excited state of religious frenzy : believes he is the risen Christ : screams and screeches until he is blue in the face : head cold as ice, cold sweat, reaches out and exhorts to repentance. “ Exhorts to repent, preaches, howls, sings obscene songs, exposes the person " (Hyos.). “ Fear and the effects of fear : fear of death and of being damned : imagines the world is on fire. " Mania with desire to cut and tear everything especially the clothes. . . . puerperal mania and convulsions with violent cerebral congestion ; bluish and bloated face ; protruding eyes ; wild shrieks, with disposition to bite and tear. . . . Alternate states of brooding, screaming and screeching. A few such remedies would empty our insane asylums, especially of recent cases. Insanity is curable if there are no incurable results of disease/’ Kent says again, “ Veratrum is a remedy that would keep many women out of the insane asylum, especially those with uterine trouble. . . . During menses, cold as death, lips blue, extremities cold and blue, dreadful pains, sinking sensa­ tions,mania to kiss everybody ” (Crocus) ; “ hysteria with a coldness at the menstrual period, copious sweat, vomiting and diarrhoea. . .” Kent remembers a taimer, one summer, who had a strange sensation when he drank water, as if it ran down the outside and did not go down the oesophagus—so marked that he requested his friends to see if it did not run down the outside. Veratrum 2m cured him. ” No remedy has produced that sensation, but I hgured it out by analogy,” says Kent. Verat, has also a sensation of cold water running in the veins. In regard to the symptom, ” head feels as if packed in ice ; as if ice lay on the vertex ”, one remembers a hospital patient, a sturdy, elderly woman, full of common sense and cheery to the last degree, who developed terrific pains in the head, and was admitted, almost insane with the suffering. Face distorted with its anguish. Remedy after remedy failed to touch her, till one day it turned out that she had a sensation of a block of ice lying on vertex : this suggested Veratrum, as did the symptom, ” attacks of pain with delirium, driving to madness ”—it was almost as bad as that ! and Veratrum quickly changed the picture, and her old self re-emerged. One will never forget Veratrum for terrific, unbearable pains in the head that change the face, almost induce insa: ity, with that icy sensation on vertex. And in regard to fain, Hahnemann says, ” Paroxysms of pains, similar to those the while hellebore root can itself produce, and which always brought the patient for a short time into a sort of delirium and mania, often yielded to the smallest dose of the above solution ” (the quadrillionth of a grain of the root). The cry for Veratrum then, consists of excessive coldness ; excessive cold sweat ; extreme thirst ; extreme violence of evacua­ tions ; extreme copiousness of vomiting, purging and sweat ; collapse ; paralytic weakness and loss of power : with violence of reactions to pain and mania. The remedies that probably come nearest to it are Arsenicum and Carbo veg. But Arsenicum has extreme anxiety and rest­ lessness, ” the Veratrum patient is quiet ” ; and Carbo veg. lacks the profuseness of evacuations and sweat. The excessive evacua­ tions also distinguish it from Camphor and Cuprum (in cholera). Homoeopathy scored its laurels in Cholera, with its three principle remedies designated by Hahnemann, who had never seen the disease, but had studied its symptoms and wrote pamphlet after pamphlet to help. Early stages, with collapse, coldness and sudden prostration. Camphor : with excessive cramps, not only in abdomen, but in, and beginning in, fingers and toes. Cuprum : with excessive cold sweat, and excessive vomiting and purging, Veratrum alb. (See Homœopathy, Vol. 1, 126 ; Vol. HI, 338).