Epidemic diarrhœa of children : Cholera Infantum.
by Dr. Margaret Lucy Tyler
Presented by Sylvain Cazalet
*
Dr Margaret Lucy TYLER
(1857-1943)
EPIDEMIC DIARRHŒA OF CHILDREN : CHOLERA
INFANTUM.Here Homœopathy, so rapidly curative
in acute disease, gives splendid results. But, of course, the remedy mus
be, not only a “homœopathic reedy”, but homœopathic. It must be a remedy not only of
diarrhœa (every drug that can cause diarrhœa is that), but it must fit
the peculiarities of this case of
diarrhœa ; otherwise there is nothing doing. One diarrhœa reedy
will not do for another. A medicine, to cure, must be able to produce
just the condition we seek to cure : outside that, no contact is
made. Some people might express it, that the vibrations of disease and
remedy must be identical -we seem to be approaching that idea. But,
however that may be, and whether it is expressed in terms of
electricity, or vibration, or Homœopathy, so urgent are these cases
that one needs their remedies at one’s finger-tips, or in portable form
for easy reference.But outside the giving of the remedy,
the child should be kept warm, and, in desperate cases, when seen first
at almost the last grap, we must remember that the infant may have lost
more fluid than it can afford to lose and live. Here fluid cannot be
retained per rectum, and many a
small life may be saved by slow absorption of warm saline,
subcutaneously.It is Hahnemann’s teaching that not
only do different cases of the same disease demand, by their peculiar
symptoms, different remedies, but also that different epidemics of the
same disease ask for different remedies. And here, in epidemic work, by
carefully collecting the symptoms of several individual cases, the genus epidemicus may disclose itself in its
entirety, and may be fitted with a medicine which will be found to cure
the majority of the cases, even where they do not all display the
complete disease picture. But it is also found that in such epidemicus
the cases not covered by the epidemic remedy are often very difficult to
match.One remembers an epidemic when a number
of children came to Out-patients with a diarrhœa that was painless,
while the stools contained much indigested food. Here China quickly put matters right. Colocinth, with its agonies of abdominal
pain, that double the victim up, again and again, and demand pressure,
would have been useless. To discover the epidemic remedy, whatever it
may be, makes prescribing easy and most satisfactory, until -which is
possible ! -the type changes- perhaps with the weather, when a
fresh remedy has to be sought.(source : Tyler, M. L. : Pointers to the common
remedies.)Copyright ©
Margaret Tyler 1912
Mise en page et arrangements Copyright © Sylvain Cazalet
2003