On Neuralgia; Its Causes and Its Remedies: With a Chapter on Angina Pectoris - Softcover

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1894 edition. Excerpt: ... On Neuralgia: its Causes and its Remedies. J N Germany, a number of years ago, I was one morning standing at the side of a celebrated professor of medicine, surrounded by a crowd of patients, watching his procedure, listening to his words of wisdom, and taking mental notes. One of the poor folk had pleurodynia, and seemed very particularly anxious to impress upon the professor the important fact that the pain was a neuralgia, and this he A did so volubly and persistently that the professor finally retorted rather testily, "Of course your pain is a neuralgia; did you ever know a pain that was not a neuralgia? every pain is a neuralgia." And, equally of course, the professor was right in so far as pain is necessarily nerve pain. For the practical purposes of this little treatise I shall understand by neuralgia any sharp paroxysmal pain that, apparently, constitutes in itself the entire case, i.e., where there is no demonstrable pathological change or anatomical cause. I do not maintain that neuralgia is a strictly scientific term, inasmuch as I hold that every neuralgia has a positive pathology if we only knew it, for our not knowing the materies morbi does not get rid of its presence. But what the word neuralgia lacks in scientific accuracy it fully makes up in practical utility, for nearly everybody knows what neuralgia is or is held to, be. This being so, I will tarry no longer over the word, but plunge at once into my subject. The authority I propose to follow is that of homoeopathic literature as well as my own experience where it has run on newer lines, and I will begin with the statement that Aconitum napellus is, probably, the most frequently indicated remedy in the scientific treatment of neuralgia. This is as well known in...