Therapeutics of diphtheritis : a compilation and critical review of the German and American homoeopathic literature / by F. Gust. Oehme.

  • Oehme, F. G. (Ferdinand Gustav), 1826-
Date:
1876
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Therapeutics of diphtheritis : a compilation and critical review of the German and American homoeopathic literature / by F. Gust. Oehme. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    Balogh (63) does not mention a most important item, i. e., the number of days it required to remove the exudate. His statement is not of much weight, because the requirements of a medicine by some physicians (like Ozanan) are very moderate. The same may be said of Mayhoffer (55), but as he used the remedy also exter- nally, he secured the chemical (fungus-destroying) power of Brom., and may have thus obtained a better success. Nos. 60 and 61 are very indefinite. Brom. is here recom- mended when the disease commences on the very lowest part of the fauces, spreading upwards, which is contrary to the usual beginning. Guernsey (62) might just as well have expressed himself briefly thus in diphtheritis of the larynx with much rattling. Ozanan and Balogh also consider Brom. the remedy for diphtheritis of the larynx. When Baehr wrote his Therapeia, very little had been written on the treatment of diphtheritis; this explains his meagre remark (54). Ozanan's misgivings that Brom. is a remedy for croup, but not for diphtheritis, is fully affirmed by Villers (56). In No. 71 Brom., as a prophylacticum, proved useless in two cases out of three. The use of Brom. in diphtheritis rests on these three points: 1, that it destroys fungous growth ; 2, that diphtheritis, when spreading to the larynx, produces symptoms similar to croup (croupy cough, hoarseness, difficult, croupy breathing); and 3, that Brom. is an important croup remedy. To reason from this that it is also a great remedy against diphtheritis of the fauces or larynx, is a wrong conclusion. If diphtheritis and croup are two entirely different diseases in their nature and character (2 a and b), Brom., being a chief croup remedy, cannot at the same time be a great diphtheritis remedy, because a drug has not only to cover the symptoms, but must likewise correspond to the charac- ter of the disease. How can one and the same remedy answer to a sthenic antl an asthenic disease, to a plastic disease and one whose tendency from the onset is decay, exhaustion, paralysis? Do we give Bellad. for headache in the full-blooded and robust, and also in the bloodless and feeble?