THERE are various types of colitis. Some are chronic and long- standing, other are very acute and rapidly fatal. I am not going to weary you with scientific descriptions of these varieties, nor with pathological details, but just dip into my bag of memory and recall a few incidents.
I was still quite raw, a young medico in her first house- surgeons job, and we had an elderly man in the ward suffering from ulcerative colitis who was passing quantities of foul pus and blood. The cause of the trouble was unknown. I cannot recall now what treatment was given to him.
The senior physicians were puzzled, and nothing could be done. In due course he was gathered to his ancestors, and the unpleasant duty of performing a post mortem fell to me. I discovered the site of the lesions and the particular variety of the colitis, but paid for my indiscretion in investigating to closely by being stricken myself with a sharp and painful attack of acute colitis, a temperature of 104, acute diarrhoea, passing much blood and pus.
I had to retire to bed and was given by the visiting doctor some bismuth mixture which duly achieved the desired effect to producing constipation. Then there was total stoppage and that had to be counteracted by a dose of castor oil. This was the one and only time in my life I have taken castor oil, and that was under protest. I remember, as I proved refractory and the nurses could not manage to get the stuff down my throat, the august matron herself appearing at my bedside and mixing the fatal draught, sandwiched between two layers of black coffee, and standing over me until it had gone down.
I admitted it was quite tasteless, but the after-effects! I grumbled: “First you make me constipated and then you start the diarrhoea again. There does not seem any sense in that treatment.” I was ill for about a week, a martyr to my profession, infected in the course of my duties. Doctors run many risks and most of them do it gladly and cheerfully for the sake of humanity. I had learned my lesson as well : never would I treat a patient the same way as I had been treated.
Many years later I had another attack of colitis. This time it was the result of eating cherries in Switzerland and drinking the ice-cold mountain water straight from the chattering brooklets, on long tramps when overheated and tired. These brooks are sometimes hotbeds of infection through pollution from cattle and herdsmen and you are warned not to drink it without boiling it.
The symptoms were yellow, watery stools with flatulence, painless and coming on worse after eating. When taking into consideration the cause of the trouble, namely eating fruit, the remedy was pretty plain. It was China. I took China m, and one dose put me right. There was no subsequent constipation, no need for taking a nauseous draught of castor oil, everything was quite simple and straightforward, much nicer than the orthodox way of procedure.
A friend who was with me on the same trip also developed colitis. She did not mention it for some time, and tried to cure it herself. She had a good deal of pain, passed quantities of mucus and had many loose motions. She was very much scared by my diagnosis of colitis. What a lot there is in a name ! Everybody told her of people they had known who had had colitis for many years. She got quite a phobia about it and, perhaps as a result of it, she did not give her symptoms as clearly as usual. Anyway, we had much trouble in clearing it up. she lost nearly all faith in me.
In the end I had a vaccine made from the secretions, and she was given graduated doses in homoeopathic dilutions of the particular bacillus which caused the colitis, not by the painful method of injection, but by the mouth. This I find answers very well, in spite of derogatory remarks of pathologists, who will not admit that this method of giving vaccines produces any results. In this case it did the trick.
The Bacillus Morgan in the 30th dilution cleared up the colitis. A short course was all that was necessary and then the constitutional remedy came in again, and finished the cure. In this case it was Pulsatilla. It was interesting how it worked once the action of the bacillus was antidoted. It would not touch the colitis itself before.
Each case presents its own problems, and one has to take each patient individually. Just because a particular person has been cured by, say China, from colitis it does not follow that each case of colitis requires China. Far from it. There are many different medicines for colitis. It often requires much study and hours of work before the right remedy is discovered. I have got an old book here by my side, which is called Bell on Diarrhoea and Dysentery. There are 150 pages on diarrhoea, and it describes the actions of 108 remedies for this bowel complaint.
Colitis is only a comparatively recent term, and one of its symptoms is diarrhoea. The older writers were not so wrapped up in pathological names like the modern product of medical schools. Well, these 108 medicines are not by any means all the drugs that you may have to study before the right one is found, and you may have to study before the right one is found,and you may give a remedy quite outside the range of this book.
Once more bed for her, not so long this time. It will take time before she is cured of her inherited disease. If only she would keep under treatment one could do more with her. Unfortunately she suffers also from an overdose of pride and lack of L s. d., a bad combination.
An old lady rises before my minds eyes. She came to me with a fractured humerus and a long tale of woe of it having been badly set in hospital it was during the war and the hospitals were run by dressers and the civilians neglected in the general mad rush of the more serious war casualties. The arm was not in alignment at all and had to be set all over again. The plucky old dame was very brave over it,too, and the pain was much relieved by the homoeopathic pain-killer, Arnica.
She fondly imagined she was getting Morphia and I did not enlighten her. On getting her better, I discovered that, as a result of years of suffering from colitis, she had gradually cut down her diet so that she lived on brown bread and Ivelcon cheese. Fruit, eggs, vegetables everything gave her pain and diarrhoeas. So gradually I changed the Arnica powders to Sulphur which has this aversion of all sorts of articles of food strongly marked. Also this good lady loved arguments. She was fond of philosophical and metaphysical arguments.
So Sulphur had it. After about two month treatment, I gently suggested her trying various other additions to her menu. She was rather doubtful, but carried out orders and found to her joy that the colitis had gone while the broken arm was mending. Her family was even more delight. “Granny is not peculiar any more,” confided her little grandchild to me.
Then there is that case of rheumatic fever followed by tuberculosis of the peritoneum. She had one foot in the grave, she was not even a walking skeleton, but just a living bag of bones. Only her brave smile told you she was still alive, and determined to carry on in spite of priests, specialists and fidgety relatives. The terrible weakness with the marked emaciation put me on the track of the right remedy. It was Selenium, a rare metal, used in dictaphones and sensitive plates of electrical burglar alarms, which made a sound healthy woman out of one who was given up by everybody.
She was alive fifteen years later without a trace of heart disease or any other weakness, and able to work hard at her church work. A living memorial to the power of Homoeopathy. I found out afterwards that she had had bouts of colitis for more than twenty years previously, unable to eat any apples, oranges, lemons unless she wished to produce days of suffering and diarrhoea. After she got up from her bed of sickness, which so nearly became her death- bed, all signs of or tendency to colitis disappeared, and she could indulge in fruit as much as she liked.
If she had had Selenium twenty years before, she would never have had that fatal abdominal weakness which helped in giving her tubercular peritonitis ! If only the general public knew and the medical profession did not scorn Homoeopathy, how much less suffering there would be in this vale of tears !.
Now in conclusion, just a few words about how to take a case of, or how to report on, a case of colitis. Notice carefully the nature of the motions, their consistency, their colour, whether blood, slime or just watery stuff is present, whether they are painless or not, whether they are scanty or the reverse, indigested,involuntary or not, whether odourless or fetid.
What ameliorates the stools, warmth or cold, pressure or bending over or stretching, what aggravates them, what foods, eating, drinking, whether day or night, walking or resting brings on the diarrhoea. What are the sensations before, during and after stools. Take note of any other symptoms that accompany the motions, restlessness, flatulence, much thirst, desire for anything out of the ordinary. Is there any vomiting? The more closely you watch each attach and the more detailed the symptoms are, the sooner you will be cured of this chronic and weakening complaints, provided you go to a good homoeopath who has studied his Materia Medica and knows his drugs.
