Woman, age 27, fourth labor, first stage; contractions at ten minute intervals. Pressure in rectum down through vagina described the pains. Vomiting bile. Lying as if exhausted, sleepy, but has had no sleep, averse to any effort, complains that nothing is being done to help. These pains had been going on through the preceding afternoon and night with no change apparent except the “exhaustion.” Sweat during the pains, especially on the head and face. Calcarea ost. 10M. was given and a practically painless expulsion occurred in about three minutes.
Of course this result could have happened and does occur sometimes without medicine. But the fact that similar results produced by the homoeopathic remedy are the rule rather than the exception even with difficult or not too durable maladjustments is a pertinent comment on the practice of applying material force with its present and after effects on the mother.
The point of this little report, however, is that in a consideration of Calcarea, Yingling directs the prescriber to look to the constitutional symptoms of the mother. These were clearly predominant in this patient.
Furthermore, Kent says somewhere that a remedy given to assist labor may confer a lasting constitutional benefit on the patient. I believe this is true. And not only with labor but also in disease where there is a demand for a metal or salt in acute disease. In both instances the benefit is not only sensational in its rapidity but lasting. An equilibrium between physical and spiritual force established that that patient may never have had before.
WATERBURY, CONN.