MAR 7 1900 NORTH AMERICAN JOURNAL OF HOMOEOPATHY. ORIGINAL ARTICLES IN MEDICINE. SYMPTOMATOLOGY VERSUS TREATMENT IN CERTAIN BRAIN AFFECTIONS, SO-CALLED.* BY JOSEPH T. O'CONNOR, M.D., PH.D. Professor of Nervous Diseases in the New York Homeopathic Medical College and Hospital. New York. 'HE subject that I am to bring before you to-day is one that, I ΤΗ am sure, has often presented itself to your minds. Therefore it is not a new subject and I trust that my presentation of it will be in a purely academic spirit. And first of all I plant myself firmly on the Organon of Hahnemann and thereon have my support, since it is as a homoeopath in the fullest sense of the word that I find reason for my argument. Hahnemann in his Organon, in a foot-note on page 50 of Dudgeons's translation, says: "It is not necessary to say that every intelligent physician would first remove this where it exists (referring to any manifest exciting or maintaining cause of disease); the indisposition thereupon generally ceases spontaneously. He will remove from the room strong-smelling flowers, which have a tendency to cause syncope and hysterical sufferings; extract from the cornea the foreign body that excites inflammation of the eye; loosen the over-tight bandage on a wounded limb that threatens to cause mortification and apply a more suitable one; lay bare and put a ligature on the wounded artery that produces fainting; endeavor to promote the expulsion, by vomiting, of belladonna berries, etc., that may have been swallowed; extract foreign substances that may have got into the orifices of the body (the nose, gullet, ears, urethra, rectum, vagina); crush the vesical calculus; open the imperforate anus of the new born infant," etc. * Read before the American Institute of Homoeopathy, at Newport, June, 1895. In this foot-note as well as in the paragraph in the text to which it belongs, Hahnemann distinctly states that every intelligent physician would remove the foreign body that does mischief, and this proposition shall furnish the basis for the first part of my argu ment. In making an argument of this kind I think it will be better to recite illustrative cases, all of them types of what every physician of some years' practice has seen. Case I.-A man receives an injury by the falling of a heavy body on his head. After the general symptoms of shock have passed he is found to have, besides some paralytic symptoms, a loss of the power of reading and also of the power of recognizing objects. Such a case actually occurred and was treated by Mr. MacEwen, a surgeon of Glasgow. And how did he treat it? He knew from the character of the symptoms that there must be something pressing upon the region of the angular gyrus of the left hemisphere; he trephined and found in that region and in the region of the neighboring supramarginal convolution a depressed fracture of the inner table of the skull in one and a splinter of bone from the inner table in the other. That is to say he knew that a body had invaded the cortex, a foreign body in all strictness, and he removed it. Case II. A man aged sixty, in full vigor of health apparently, is suddenly seen to make some motion to save himself from falling, and sinks to the ground. Passers-by hurry to his assistance, but find him unconscious, with respiration blowing and stertorous, face red, carotids pulsating strongly. He is taken to a hospital and from the examination there it is determined that he has suffered a stroke of apoplexy, that one side of the body is paralyzed and it is argued from the age of the patient, the suddenness of the onset, the depth of the coma present and the congestive symptoms that there has been a hæmorrhage within the skull cavity. Can this condition. be called, in the case specified, a disease of the brain? I think you will all answer this question unhesitatingly in the negative. The brain has been invaded by a foreign body, by a mass of blood poured out through a break in the blood-vessel. The mass of blood not only acted as a foreign body by simple pressure, but also by ploughing through more or less of the nerve structures. What could the surgeon do in such a case? If from the symptoms he could assure himself that the lesion is upon the surface of the brain and was definitely localizable he could trephine at the proper place and remove the clotted blood, just as Mr. MacEwen did the depressed bone and the splinter. In other cases the surgeon could do noth |