Inside out.
by Dr Elizabeth Wright Hubbard
Presented by Sylvain Cazalet
Dr E. Wright
HubbardYou know, I never have
the time to write a paper. The Steno-typist saves my life.The title of this is
just two words, “Inside Out”. You remember from embryology
that the skin and the nervous system develop from the same layer,
therefore my cases are going to be those of the skin and those of the
mind-five skin and one mind. Also, because I like the number seven, I am
going to give you one more case at the end, which is neither skin nor
mind, but to put it mildly (for Dr. Grimmer’s sake), a tumor. I
personally think it was a sarcoma, but as it wasn’t operated upon,
nobody can be sure. In that case the “Inside out” still
applies because, as you will see when we come to it, the mental symptoms
disappeared first and the physical later.To start, then, with
the first of the skin cases, that bane of the regular physician,
eczema :
Case No. 1
–
Mrs. H. O—.,
thirty-four, never heard of Homœopathy. She had such terrible eczema of
the hands that she was incapacitated from earning her living as a
pianist. It is interesting how fate brings forward the one aspect that
you need and use. She was dressed to a “T”. She was
exquisite-platinum silver hair, grey eyes, alabaster skin,
immaculate-rather frightened, coming to a strange kind of doctor. A very
cosmopolitan lady, who had toured Europe to play. She was singularly
symptom less except for these poor hands, which were bound up. I
unrolled the gauze and looked at them. They were a mess-cracks,
bleeding-just horrible hands.The one interesting
thing in her history was that twenty years ago, when she was a girl, she
had had violent eczema of the hands and had been hospitalized. They had
given her every known salve. Nothing happened. Nature was too strong for
them. Finally, they gave X-ray treatments. She smiled-“and that
cured me”. Through the years she was a pianist and had no trouble
with her hands until two years before I saw her. Then the whole thing
came back again, worse than ever. She had tried everything up and down
Par Avenue (The Doctor’s Street in New York.), and up and down wherever
the street is in Chicago where they have doctors. No
“soap !” She still couldn’t play and was practically in a
decline as a real artist is when thwarted.There was no family
history, or none that would help me, no history of tuberculosis, very
few symptoms, I looked at her. Her hair was mousy under the dye, her
skin was too lovely, her temperament was too excessive under restraint,
and I thought for once I was going to follow instinct, so I gave her
Tuberculinum 10M, one dose. I have seen her only twice since then, but
every two weeks she writes from wherever she is, or calls up if she is
near enough and says. “I don’t need to come in. My hands are
wonderful. I am playing. I am so grateful, but you had better send me
some more of those little pills because I don’t have enough. Last night
I only took three, instead of four, and I didn’t do quite as well.
Case No
. 2–
Something apparently
quite trivial- a girl of fourteen, whose father brought her in. She was
a little fat girl ; I am slender in comparison. She was shy and she
was flippant when papa corrected her, as he did. She was weepy when we
talked about her symptoms. She had eczema of the face, poor child,
bleeding, cracked-what a mess ! She had lovely blond hair, and a
pretty frock, but her face was just a battlefield.She had a history of
first menses a year ago, pinkish, three days, no symptoms, and none
since. Basal metabolism was normal. What to do ? Cracks, fatness,
flippancy, weeping. I found out she was moderately constipated inspite
of a beautiful diet -Graphites 10M, one dose.Two weeks later a very
pretty girl walked into my office, without papa, with a smile, with a
face all clear except a couple of little tiny places on the cheeks, and
her first remarks was, “I bad a period two days after I saw
you.”That case is fairly
recent, so we shall see.
Case No. 3 –
Master
G. D—., poor child, had had all the conventional allergy tests, some
eighty of them. He is seven. The only thing they found him allergic to
was wheat. If he passes by a bakery, he begins to scratch ; so mama
cut out all the wheat. Try to feed a nice, healthy exuberant
seven-year-old and let him go play in other people’s houses without
wheat. If he had wheat, he busted out all over, like June, face, elbows,
knees, back, everywhere but his “tummy”.He was a cute kid,
blond, intelligent, happy, cheery ; how chilly, however, I said to
the mother, “Doesn’t he have anything but this allergy to
wheat ?”“Oh”, she
said, “of course he has always had a sniffle.”I said, “What do
you mean, sniffle ?”She said, “He
never gets up without using up two or three handkerchiefs. He doesn’t
sneeze a great deal., but he does sniffle and he blows his nose, and it
runs.”I said, “Oh, he
has hay fever.”“Oh, no. They say
it is not hay fever because he does it twelve months of the year.”“Does he
cough ?“No.”
“Does he have
headaches ?“No.”
Sniffle, eczema,
wheat-nothing else. I thought-well, what do we do with this one ?
So I gave him my favorite potency in the entire Materia Medica, Psorinum
15C. Why I hang my hat on 15C. I don’t know, but it does so much better
for me than for anybody else, and so much better than anything else.
Psorinum 15C -I love that bottle.His mother called me
up. She is very ignorant of Homœopathy. She is quite a social lady and
she cannot tell you a symptom. I don’t know how the child has grown up.
She said, “You know it is a funny thing. David still has his
eczema, but he doesn’t sniffle”.I said, “That is
something. Why don’t you feed him some wheat ?”She said, “Feed
him wheat ?” I said, “Yes, feed him a little wheat and
see what happens.” She said, “If you say so.”I said, “Call me
up after the weekend,” so she called me up and said David had had a
couple of pieces of bread each day and nothing happened. The eczema
didn’t get any worse, and he didn’t sniffle.So we let him ride, and
in the course of two or three months the eczema was gone, and David
didn’t sniffle, and David was eating all the crackers and all the bread
and cookies he wanted. I forbade her to give him chocolate, to which he
was not allergic, because in my experience chocolate and eczema just
absolutely do not gibe. If you have eczema, you can’t have chocolate. I
don’t know who agrees with me.
Case No. 4
–
Here is an older person
who called me up and said, “I have been to three doctors, all of
whom you know-none of them are homœopaths -and I think I had better
leave them.”“Well”, I
said, “they are nice, honest doctors, what ails you,
madam ?” “Eczema.”I grinned into the
telephones and said, “All right, come along. “.She is a typical
frustrated spinster of fifty-six, long, lean and efficient, somebody’s
crack secretary. She only has her eczema in one place, on the vulva on
the right labium major, which is swollen and there is a great patch like
red shoe leather, and it itches so she nearly loses her mind. When I
first looked at it, I thought, “My heavens, this is a skin
cancer !”I said, “What have
they been doing to you for this ?”She said, “Oh,
yes,” and went into everything, starting with lotions and ending
with X-ray. When I heard about the X-ray, I knew why it looked that way.I said, “Do me one
favor. Put nothing on it unless it is lanolin, Calendula cream or
fuller’s earth-ever heard of it ? It feels cool and comfortable and
absorbs any sweat. Now let me hear the story of your life”.The chief motif of her
life was resentment. She supports her mother, who is dying of cancer,
and has lived with her all her life. She began by saying how wonderful
her mother was and, before she left the office, she said “I wish
she would die. I wish I could kill her.”Then she said,
“Oh, I never have said that in my life. I don’t mean it.”I said, “Oh, yes
you do, dear. Oh, yes, you do, and your cure-has begun.”Afraid of being
along-she had thought of parking mother somewhere and supporting her,
but couldn’t bear to live alone. Wants somebody always there. So
exhausted-she ought to take a vacation for six months but she can’t. She
has to have the money. No reason for the exhaustion-negative chest
X-ray, negative urine negative blood. They all said the exhaustion was
psychogenic. She-was very chilly ; she walked the floor while she
interviewed me, up and down, up and down, like the animals at the zoo.Finally, she amused me
enormously by bringing a bag to the second interview, a big bag entirely
full of other people’s medicines, which she put out in rows on the
desk : “These are the medicines’ from 1946. These are the
medicines from 1947”, and so on up, most of the bottles empty, and
I said “Why did you bring these ?”I said, “You came
to me. I am going to give you one little-dose”.She looked at me. You
know, one of my complaints (and I haven’t too many) about Kent’s
Repertory is that when you look up-presentment”, what does it tell
you ? “See malicious.” That is not right. Resentment is
not malicious, but that is where you have to look for it. So I took that
as Symptom. I finally got out of her that her itching was worse at two
in the morning, woke her up every night at two in the morning. I happen
to know the “gal” socially, and the one thing I have ever
observed about her you couldn’t miss, which is that she owns more
expensive and fantastic hats than anyone else I ever knew. If you saw
her every week, she would have a different hat on, and I know there
isn’t one of them that cost under ? 30, yet she lives’ way uptown
in a small apartment and saves money madly. She can’t afford to do this
or that. You would almost say she is miserly except for the hats.There are two mentals,
avaricious and vain. Take resentment, avarice, vanity, exhaustion,
prostration out all degree, and restlessness, waking at two in the
morning, eczema and what have you ? Arsenicum 200 (because she is
fairly old), one dose.She likes us, She is
going to stay with us. She is telling the other doctors that we have
helped her.
Case No. 5
–
Oh, the bane of my
life, an eight-month-old ; baby from a horribly psoric family. Papa
is a minister. I don’t know why it is, but ministers’ children (I am
one) have tough lives. The baby was born excellently, everything under
homœopathic care, everything very fine and suddenly Miss. R. B—.
bloomed out with an eczema. She is a fat baby, weight a ton when you
pick her up- these little Calcarea babies. Her mother tells me that even
at three and four months, if any paper was nearby, her first was at it
and she put it in her mouth, or she would chew the sheet-she would get
anything she shouldn’t eat.Her face was just a
bloody mask, though they kept her nails cut and filed. She was shocking.
When they brought her into me, I said I had never seen anything so
pathetic as this poor child. She was a great milk guzzler, a bottle
baby. We stopped the milk and tried goats milk, and canned milk, and dry
milk, and none of it made any difference. It wasn’t the milk.I gave her, just sort
of desperately, a dose of Calcarea carb. 10M. It did something, but it
didn’t do much. After two or three weeks, the mother said, “This
isn’t doing it.” The mother knows about Homœopathy. I said,
“Tell me more-tell me more.”She said, “Her
diapers are frightful. It is as though I spilled the household ammonia
on them.”“Does she take
lots of water ?”“Oh, she is an
elegant guzzler. She drinks water ; she drinks milk.”“What
else ?”“Well, she seems to like everything fatty, that
is one thing. And her poor little tail.”“Has she eczema
around it ?” “No, but it is all little cracks and hurts
so awfully when I try to dry her.”I said to myself,
‘Cracks on the tail, cracks on the face, ammonia urine, baby eight
months old. Come up, Nitric acid bottle.’So I gave her a dose of
Nitric acid. You would think that was a remedy for more mature people,
but I had a child in my own family, of five, with frightful whooping
cough and hemorrhages, and Nitric acid cured him in twenty-four hours,
so you never know. I gave Nitric acid, and the mother called up in the
next ten days and said, “It was wonderful ! She is fine”.I thought, “Aha,
for a while”, so the next week she called up and said, “I must
bring the baby in.” It was a Sunday. “She has glands as big as
a house.”I said, “Bring her
in.”She brought her in, and
at first I thought she had the mumps. Her poor little carotids and
cervicals were swollen ; and stony hard, not tender, not red, no
sore throat. She could take lemon juice which, as you know, people with
mumps cannot take. The glands in the groin were as big as a pullet’s egg
and so were the glands under the arm ; blood count normal, DO
fever. Where do we go from here ? I went to the Kent Repertory and
I sweat bood, and I finally found that I just had to give the child a
dose of Conium 10M, one dose. The glands went steadily down. The child
felt steadily better, and the eczema cleared up, and God knows
why ! I don’t.The end is not yet.
That child is deeply psoric and will need to be doctored, as I told the
mother, for at least another three or four years, but it is interesting.
I learned from that that you must have given the indicated remedy even
if it does not have one of the chief complaints. I think that may help
you.
Case No. 6
–
There are the five
cases and you are done with the skin, and now I will give you one case
of the mind. I have a dear friend who loathes Homœopathy and gave a
building to a regular medical school. She had a child and when I looked
at him some twenty years ago, I thought, “If I could only give that
baby a dose of Calcarea carb.” I talked to her as a friend and I
said, “Let me give that child a dose of his constitutional
remedy.”“Homœopathy !
I should say not !”I have watched that
child socially. He has always been backward, subnormal, in and out of
mental hospitals. He is the cross of the father and the mother, who love
him dearly, and who try according to their lights, to do their stuff.
Finally she called me up professionally, last year, and she said,
“You know, nearly twenty years ago, you told me Homœopathy would
help that child, and I didn’t believe you. I have tried everything else,
and the mental hospital tell me he is schizophrenic and I might as well
institutionalize him, there is no hope for him. Will you take him as a
patient ?”I said, “God is
often late. Yes, bring him in”.So he came in. He is a
beautiful, blond, pink-skinned lad, with strawberry-gold hair, glacial
blue eyes, handsome, slender, cultivated, neatly dressed-looks like his
mother. He was so nervous and fidgety he could not sit in a chair. He
had me jittery just watching him, and yet at that phase there was
nothing violent. He had had rather maniac outbreaks in which they had to
paraldehyde him and send him to a mental hospital ; but now he was
slow-phased, and if you asked him a question, he would look to his
mother.I said to her,
“Please don’t answer. I want his answer or nobody’s answer.”He sort of looked at me
and slowly the interview progressed and he began to answer almost
monosyllabically his symptoms, as you can imagine, were hard to get. He
wanted people. He didn’t want to be left alone. He had studied a
little-the A, B, C’s which was all they felt he could do, writing and
spelling, and saying 6 and 7 are 13, if the mother sat and watched him.
If she went into the other room-nothing.He stayed in the
bathroom, I found out, for hours, with the door locked, and yet when I
asked his mother if he masturbated or had any sexual difficulty,
“Oh, not !” and I could hear her say, “In a
minister’s family !” (Laughter)He had been having
paraldehyde every night, 2 ounces, to sleep ; otherwise they
couldn’t keep him at home, he would be prowling all night. “His
father has to work. I have to work”. So I didn’t say, “Stop
the paraldehyde.” I thought, “Well, thank God, it is nothing
else.” Paraldehyde is so disgusting, no one would take it if they
didn’t have to.He was totally
dependent but obviously vain, and neat. I know he was very jealous of
his normal, younger twin brothers, though he assured me he was very
sweet to them and had never been the least bit jealous of them.We gave this child, in
July, 1952, Arsenicum 200, one dose. Gradually they were able to cut off
the paraldehyde. She changed to bromides for him without asking me. I
didn’t fuss. Gradually the child got better and I said, “Let’s have
no more bromides unless he has a very bad night.” He went on from
July of 1952 until April, 1953. His mother was nervous. She was afraid
he might slide back, so I gave him one dose of Saccharum lactis through
the interval, once every four months.He is home all the
time. She felt he was beginning to get restless again, so just before
Easter she brought him in and I could see he didn’t look quite as well
as the last time and I said, “Well, what is new, boy ?”He said, “I want
salt. I want salt.” I looked at him, and he said, “I want to
go see girls.”Something new I The
nervous blond wants salt and want to go see girls. May be something
comes up, so I thought a little and I gave him a dose of Phosphorus 10M
-so help me !- one dose, and I said to his mother, “If
anything goes wrong in the next three, or four days, don’t send him to
any mental hospital. You telephone me.”Sure enough, four days
later she called me up in the middle of night and said, “He is off.
He is gone. He is crazy.”I said, “You mean
he has gone out of the house ?”“Oh, no, he is
right here. I had to give him some paraldehyde.”I said, “Think
nothing of it. I gave him a remedy which has an aggravation at four
days. Tomorrow or the day after tomorrow he is going to be better.”So help me, I made an
act of faith.She said, “Do you
really think so ? You have helped me and I will believe you, but we
can’t hold out through more than a day or two like this.”I said, “If you
can’t hold out, I will get you a nurse, but don’t send that child
anywhere.”Next day she called up
and said, “How do you do ? I know. You told me on the fourth
day he would raise Cain, and yon told me by today he would be all right,
and he has not been so well in twenty years.”I said, “All
right, I don’t want to hear from you until he is beginning to be worse.
No saccharum lactis this time.”She brought him in the
other day, two months later. He came in and said, “Mother, do you
mind going out of the room ?” He talked to me and said he was
so well nowadays that daddy and mother were going to send him to
boarding school. I found out it was a school for rather difficult and
abnormal boys, quite a wonderful place.I said, “Are you
happy to go ?”He said, “I am
looking forward to it. May be I can begin to live.” So, we shall
see-even twenty years late.
Case No. 7
–
Now I will give you
just one that one which neither “outside” nor
“inside”. A kid was brought to us who had had a sore throat,
temperature of 104°F. He was seven years old I guessed and his father
had had rheumatic fever. I didn’t like it. He had symptoms, vaguely. His
right leg, behind the knee, bothered him a little, so I gave him a dose
of Rhus tox. 200, and we did his blood count, and it didn’t show much-it
didn’t show what it ought to have shown.His urine was all
right, and I said, “Bring him back in two or three days.”His mother brought him
back and said, “This child has a lump which I discovered when I
bathed him. It is behind his knee, a little on the outside,” I felt
a lump and I thought, “Oh-Oh !” It was as big as a
pullet’s egg. It was as hard as a stone. It had a ridge in it like
serrated rock. If I ever felt a really cancerous growth, that was it. He
had a couple of little almond glands in the groin, none elsewhere, and
he had seen a surgeon who told the mother he should go instantly to the
hospital and have the lump out ; that it was a sarcoma of the bone.
I thought it might be that, too.She was very homœopathic
and she said, “I want you to try with the remedy.” I said,
“If you promise me I will see this child regularly and ‘I often, if
the family is willing, I will take a chance, but I warn you, I don’t
know.”She said, “He has
the following mentals ; he is the devil temperamentally. He is
cross. He is ornery, and thrashes around. I can’t do anything with him.
He weeps. He has a big square ;. Calcarea-looking brow.”I looked up in the
Repertory for lumps in that position, stony hardness -Calcarea fluorica-
and I gave him, sure of pathologically, Calcarea fluorica 10M, one dose.
That was last November (1952). He has never had another dose of
medicine, and when he was seen this May, neither may associate nor I
could find any lump whatsoever. His mentals cleared first, and the lump
stopped growing but did not decrease. We have seen him every two weeks
through the winter and the lump has gone steadily and slowly down. In
April I could find it only if I know I was looking for it. In May it was
gone.I wish someone would
tell me whether it was a sarcoma.
Source :
1953.
Copyright ©
Sylvain Cazalet 2001
