Merc. Cor., 6th.—Frequent urging and straining, severe pain. Discharges slight, greenish, or mixed with mucous. Six pellets four times a day.
The symptoms of pregnancy treated thus far are usually the result of some disturbance in the operations of alimentation. The few remaining to be considered would scarcely ever occur, if the entire system were rightly nourished. Still, not being immediately the result of failure in the digestive act, they merit special attention.
Neuralgia and neuralgic toothache are common and distressing symptoms during gestation. The child of the forest, the peasant girl of Europe and the dusky cotton picker of the South probably have no conception of a neuralgic pain.
Our cultured civilization incurs the infraction of so many physical laws that it is difficult to find the cause of any disease. Neuralgia is not unfrequently the constant companion of the bilious, overfed, or perhaps, I should say, the carbonaceously fed subject. Too much fuel, and too little oxygen!
Lack of nerve food is another cause. The phosphates and other saline elements are insufficient. Also exhausted and weakened nerves, making an effort to recuperate, give the possessor great suffering. The mother, who already has several children, wearied and worried by their many wants, whose domestic cares are a continual burden, who has no surcease from the sexual relation, is the one likely to suffer from neuralgia. Often the pregnant woman strains every nerve that her house be put and kept in order. She spends anxious days and sleepless nights in weary watching over a sick child or husband. Suffering must surely follow. The tonics, stimulants and opiates prescribed by most physicians cause worse symptoms than the original trouble. Nature demands only rest. The relief obtained by drugs is at too great a sacrifice of vital force. Nearly all that take opiates attest that on the following day sufferings ensue from nausea, headache, loss of appetite, constipation, etc.
In most cases hot applications will give sure relief. Why is it, that simple measures are the last thought of? Use the fomenter locally; if that is not sufficient, give a full hot or thermal bath. (See [Chap. VIII].)
Human magnetism is superior to all other agents for neuralgia. Nearly every family has some member that possesses the gift of healing by the “laying on of hands.” The spine and extremities should be manipulated, and then the affected part. The patient will fall into a restful sleep, awaken refreshed, if not cured, and have no poisonous drugs to be eliminated from the system.
Some years ago I was called late at night to a lady who for days had suffered untold agony from facial neuralgia. Her face was greatly swollen and the pain was so intense that she had nearly lost her reason. An eminent physician, under the popular delusion that it was malaria, had prescribed quinine. As she had protested against its internal administration, he ordered her bathed in an unction of quinine and cosmoline. Each day finding the patient worse, he increased the frequency of the quinine bath.
Upon my entering the room, she seized my hand with a vise-like grip and cried: “Doctor, give me something, or I must die of this agony!”
I assured her that she should have help. Turning to her husband, I said: “Bring me a wash-bowl with hot water and ammonia in it. Put four bricks in the furnace as soon as you can.”