04/24/2026
More great cases and insights from Adolph Lippe MD...
"We shall now endeavor to demonstrate the correctness of the 154th paragraph, and what Hahnemann really did understand by admonishing and teaching us to consider the “characteristic symptoms” of the sick as essential to our therapeutics.
We will first relate two cases of sickness in the same individual and then close with our comments.
Mr. J. W., age 17 years, was suffering from typhus abdominalis. He was not ill until the fourteenth day, when I found that a very violent diarrhea had set in; stools involuntary, watery, very offensive. Pulse over 120 per minute, small and feeble; abdomen not very sensitive to the touch. He was all the time whining, without being able to say why he did so; he was not restless, but had not slept during the night when this change of symptoms had set in. One single dose of Apis mellifica (high) very soon changed this rather alarming condition, and he recovered fully in due time.
Mr. J. W., was taken down seven years later with smallpox, during an epidemic prevailing in this city; had had smallpox when nine years of age, and I had then treated him. On my evening visit, on the third day of his illness, I found him in the same mental condition as on the fourteenth day of typhus, whining; the eruption had ceased to develop itself; pulse extremely feeble and rapid; he had not passed any urine for more than eighteen hours; no thirst; great apathy; could not say what caused him to whine. One dose of Apis mellifica (high) was given him that evening. On the next morning he was out of danger, no more whining; the eruption was developed to an extent never before observed; the pustules were as large as Malaga grapes; he had passed enormous quantity of urine during the night. He fully recovered without being pitted.
Comments.—The same individual developed in two entirely different forms of disease, extraordinary, peculiar, predominant (characteristic) symptoms. In the first form of disease, the mental symptoms did not necessarily belong to it; the diarrhea was peculiar, not often present in the way it here appeared; the watery, very offensive evacuations were extraordinary, and called strongly for Apis. Especially was the mental symptom peculiar, both to the patient and remedy. Should I have indulged in a pathological hypothesis? Should I have treated the evident affection Peyer’s bodies? Then Apis mellifica would not have been indicated, as the stools most calling for that remedy in that form of disease, consist partly of flakes of pus with bloody tinges; but as Apis also causes watery, very offensive stools, the pathological hypothesis had to be abandoned. Or did the great weakness, the fact that he suffered from typhus, and that the stools were very offensive, indicate Arsenicum album? Not at all; the characteristic restlessness, and desire to be warmly covered of Arsenicum album where not present. The symptoms not necessarily belonging to the disease indicated the remedy.
In the second form of disease, the symptoms were still graver than in the first form. Patients suffering similarly from inactivity of the kidneys while the eruptions doesn’t develop and treated by allopathic physicians had all died. The pathological condition and the danger thereof were well defined, but the most prominent mental symptom was characteristic of the individual; it led me many years before to give him Apis mellifica with decided benefit; it did not necessarily belong to the disease or its pathological condition; this very peculiar mental symptom and also the suppression of the kidney functions found its counter-representation in Apis mellifica, and the patient recovered.
It was, so far as I could learn, the first time that Apis mellifica was administered in smallpox. Apis never caused an eruption even resembling smallpox, therefore the Regenerated Materia Medica would not admit into its picture-book of real diseases, a picture of small-pox under Apis mellifica. The whining mood was peculiar, extraordinary, predominant in this individual, who when well, from his childhood up, was of a very lively, cheerful temperament. To just such symptoms here described Hahnemann call our attention, to symptoms peculiar to the individual, not necessarily belonging to the form of disease we have to cure. Such symptoms we find in our materia medica always, but never in the picture-book of real diseases, should such a caricature ever see the light of day, which is very doubtful. As long as we claim to be homeopathicians, we will, we must, accept Hahnemann’s teachings as we find them in his Organon of the Healing Art. (Extract from The Organon of Hahnemann (Paragraph 154) with notes. Organon 1880; 3: 435-443.)"
