ping to inquire ought this to have been prevented by drug action, or inquiring if there was a better way. We manifest no such indifference to the sufferings of any other condition as to those of child-bearing. It is the only instance where we consider pain physiological. Are you sure it is physiological? Our indifference causes women to neglect themselves even with Dame Nature loudly admonishing. In what other state would we disregard the warning headache, sleeplessness, etc., of uræmia until a convulsion summons the doctor?

Physicians do not atack the sufferings of child-bearing with the intent of cure; in the words of Hahnemann we do not go about it "in a thorough manner and to a purpose." There has been too little shooting straight forward and with a definite aim. We believe obstetrics is a neglected field as to therapeutics. We have not accomplished what we ought. We have not tried. We give chamomilla to the fretting baby to palliate the pain of a cutting tooth. Does it palliate? Many physicians give drugs in addition to their chloroform or morphine in gallstone colic, or in the passage of renal calculi, claiming that the after condition of those who take medicines is far more satisfactory than in those who do not. I know a physician who never fails to study the pains of parturition for a remedy. Hypericum is his favorite one, and he claims such soothing effects from hypericum that I doubt not if obliged to choose between this and chloroform that he would keep hypericum. We have been hearing of late some things, some very pleasant things, as to the value of strychnia pros. in labor. We believe there is no stage in child-bearing that may not be palliated by drug action. And by drug action we do not mean hygiene, sanitation, or mechanical treatment. They are essential and have their place. When the profession has done what it ought in this field, a woman will be under the care of her physician from the beginning of conception, not for drug dosing, but for scientific observation and treatment, be it hygienic, mechanical, or drug. To those of you who are disappointed, who had expected from the title of this paper a differentiation of nux vomica, sepia, or ipecac in "morning sickness," I refer you to Guernsey, as yet our most valuable authority, and suggest that in Ludlam's Dis

eases of Women, in the works on gynecology, especially Southwick, Woods, Minton and others you will find many valuable hints as to the action of drugs to help you in the therapeutics of obstetrics. Again, we suggest sometimes when you are treating a case of tuberculosis, chronic nephritis, or what not, and are appalled to find pregnancy has occurred, or if you have typhoid fever, pneumonia, or some other disease complicating pregnancy, and are discouraged as to what can be done, you will find it helpful to re-read Hahnemann on chronic diseases and his writings of the action of one disease on another. It will give you hope and courage, and a better understanding of how to proceed in the treatment of what is to be cured and what alleviated. Bartlet's new work on diagnosis has this opening sentence which it is well to remember in connection with the therapeutics of obstetrics, "More mistakes are made by not looking than by not knowing.”

SOME HINTS AS TO THE TREATMENT OF STERILITY, WITH A CLINICAL CASE.*

BY JOHN MCLACHLAN, M. D.

Probably homeopathy is the only system of medicine that can intelligently take into account the various temperaments and diatheses to which the human body, in a very true sense, is heir under the far-reaching law of heredity; certain it is that homeopathy is the only system of medicine that can make any rational use of the observations thus made. Some of us, I am

afraid, are inclined to sneer at Hahnemann's doctrine of chronic diseases, or at least to treat it with that indulgent pity with which one is wont to regard a person of defective intellect. To do so, however, is to be guilty of a great injustice and to forget that this doctrine is merely the "heredity" of the present day evolutionist in a somewhat old-fashioned dress. The great underlying truth, the essential idea, is the same in both cases. It is possible that the dress in which the chronic diseases is presented to us may be fairly made the subject of criticism, but we must remember that that dress is nearly 100 years old, and fashions change; but through all changes of fashion the great underlying fact does not change, i. e., that there is a man to be clothed, an idea to be presented in some dress or other. Each style of dress is necessarily local, the product of a tima and a place, but the central idea, the man to be clothed. is universal, and clothes are made for the man, and not man for the clothes. So it is with the great doctrine of chronic diseases; the dress in which it is presented may vary, but the essential idea is there, and is unaffected by fashions, and the most successful healer of the sick will be he who makes use of this fact in an intelligent manner. It is of far more importance to get an intelligent grasp of the doctrine than to criticise the dress in which it may happen to be encased; just as "a man's a man for a' that," whether he appears in kilt or trousers, or even in statu naturæ.

In no department of therapeutics is this so important as in * Section of Materia Medica and Therapeutics, Trans. British Homeopathic Society.

that dealing with disorders and diseases of women, and under this head I also include the as yet little studied, but exceedingly important, subject of pre-natal medication. If we are ever to snap the fetters that bind our race to the wheel of "heredity this will be done most easily and effectively during intra-uterine life. The law of heredity is looked upon by the evolutionist as inexorable, but it is not so to the physician who applies the principles of homeopathy with brains.

In the present short paper, however, I propose to make a few remarks merely concerning sterility. Of this disorder Matthews Duncan writes: "There is scarcely any condition of a married woman which more surely causes unhappiness than sterility." Other gynecologists speak of it as "the great opprobium of married life." I presume they are speaking from the married woman's point of view, and not merely as obstetric physicians. During the past decade I have treated many such (by internal medication alone), in all, save one case, with success. In the, as yet, unsuccessful case the husband has a very well-marked phthisical family history, and has in his younger years suffered from what I believe was tubercular disease of one, if not both, testicles.

When a married couple, apparently suitable in every way to each other and well within the "statute of limitations on the female side, do not, in the course of three or four, or at most eight or ten years, cause an increase in the population, is most cases they begin to be alarmed, and fear that there must be something wrong somewhere. Now, curiously enough it is the wife that usually gets all the blame; but this, in my opinion, is most unjust, and an echo of times barbaric, for I believe that the husband is to blame in a far larger number of cases than generally supposed. Of course the homeopathic physician need not restrict himself to internal medication. I see no reason why, in stenosis of the cervical canal, he may not pass graduated bougies, sponge, or laminaria tents; only, as the spermatozoa are microscopic in size, one does not see how mere stenosis of the genital canal can prevent their passage. Or again, if the secretion of the vagina is unduly acid, and therefore destructive to the vitality of the spermatozoa, there seems no reason why a weak solution of sodium bicarbonate may

not be used as a wash on certain occasions.

At the same time

I have always aimed at curing the condition by internal medication alone-but then I am not a gynecologist.

So little is known on the physiology of normal conception that any considerations with regard to sterility must be mainly theoretical, and this fact, I think, should lead us to place our chief trust in homeopathic methods for the cure of the condition. In the case I now wish to bring before you there was not a plethora of symptoms either to guide or misguide one. There seemed no reason, so far as I could make out, why the woman should not conceive; yet for something like three years there was not the slightest indication of it. There were no miscarriages, and both husband and wife were becoming anxious, more especially as one of her sisters had proved hopelessly sterile. The chief symptoms were the following:

(1) Sterility, without any sign of miscarriages.

(2) She frequently suffered from a sore throat, which was aggravated on swallowing nothing; swallowing food did not hurt her.

(3) She had a small goiter.

(4) She frequently suffered from a throbbing frontal headache.

(5) She had a great aversion to eggs.

(6) The menses were at times intermittent. Now on consulting the "Materia Medica Pura," under ferrum, we find the corresponding group of symptoms:

(1) "Sterility without abortion" (150).

(2) "Sometimes a sensation as from a plug in the throat when not swallowing, not whilst swallowing" (53 in brackets). (3) "Chronic grandular swelling in the neck" (56), though one cannot be sure whether this refers to lymphatic glands or to the thyroid glands.

(4) "Every two or three weeks, for two, three, or four days, headache, hammering, and beating, so that she must sometimes lie down in bed" (25, in brackets).

(5) Aversion to eggs I cannot find in any "pathogenesis of ferrum; I assume, therefore, that this symptom is a "clinical" one. Lippe, in his "Materia Medica," gives "vomiting after eggs," though I would point out in passing that "

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