FURUNCLES AND CARBUNCLES
are likewise cured by Apis in the speediest and easiest manner.
We find the following symptomatic indications in the American Provings: "682, painful pimple, suppurating in the middle, with red areola; painful like a boil, in the hairy region on the left side above the os pubis, continuing painful for several days; 1196, furuncles with stinging pains; 844, 845, violent, stinging, burning pain at a small spot on the left side, in the lower region of the nape of the neck; also on the back part of the head; swelling at the nape of the neck, so that the head is pressed forward towards the chest; 1222, dark bluish-red painful swellings, with general malaise; 1167, acute pain and erysipelatous swelling, very hard and pale in the centre."
Apis has been a popular remedy for boils from time immemorial; the people have been in the habit of covering boils with honey, more particularly honey in which a bee had perished.
Apis, homœopathically prepared, is better adapted to such an end than honey. A few drops of Apis 3, shaken with twelve tablespoonfuls of water, a tablespoonful of this solution every three hours, generally relieves the pain in a short period, promotes suppuration, effects the discharge of the decayed cellular tissue, and a speedy cure of the furuncle.
If furuncles incline to become carbunculous, the ichorous matter is speedily changed to good pus, and all danger is averted.
In a case of carbuncle the gangrenous disorganization of the skin and cellular tissue becomes very soon confined to a small spot; the dead parts are separated from the living tissues; the fever is hushed; the disorganizations which it threatens are averted; a healthy suppuration is established throughout the gangrenous part, detaching and removing all decayed matter, and replacing the loss of substance by new granulations until the sore becomes cicatrized in such a hardly perceptible manner, that any one who is acquainted with the ravages of this disease, and is in the habit of seeing deep and disfiguring cicatrizes, even in the most successful cases, is disposed to deny the fact that such an intensely disorganizing process has been going on in this instance. No other remedial means are required, much less a surgical operation.
Inasmuch as carbuncle is generally preceded for a longer period by a deep-seated feeling of illness in the organism, showing that the psoric miasm pervades the tissues, it behooves us, in order to secure all the better a favorable result, to give a dose of highly-potentized Sulphur at the very outset of the disease. After having used the first portion of Apis, a globule of Sulphur 30 or 6000 may be interposed, the former in all cases where no Sulphur had been used, and the latter in cases Sulphur had been used in large doses. We permit such a dose to act for twenty-four hours, after which Apis is resumed, and continued according to the above stated rule.
Sulphur should likewise be given in all cases where the furuncles reappear at different periods. Such a reappearance of the eruption, after it had once been cured by Apis, shows that a psoric taint pervades the organism which it is absolutely necessary to meet with specific counter-acting remedies.
The more frequently we meet such difficult complications, and see with our own eyes their successful treatment, the more we learn to appreciate the fact, that Apis cures to a certainty the most dangerous affections of this kind, and that the anti-psoric remedy corrects at the same time the primary degeneration of the tissues, without either interfering with the operations of the other drug, on the contrary, by assisting each other. In