Asthma, hurried (breathing?) with concomitant catarrhal affections of the bronchial mucous surfaces.
(It is a popular domestic remedy in asthma. Eclectic physicians value it highly in throat affections. Some homœopathic physicians, Drs. Small, Kendall and others have used it with gratifying results.—Hale.)
Horses that eat of the leaves mixed in hay are cured or relieved of the heaves and chronic loose cough.
Catarrh of the bladder.
Dr. Hale did not prove this remedy. All symptoms except the last one are clinical, that is, they disappeared while the patient was taking the remedy but they have not been produced on the healthy. The last symptom is a pathogenetic symptom verified by cure. There is, however, a proving of silphium but it is buried deep in the dust that covers old reports and has not seen the light of day for many a year. I reprint it here from the Hahnemannian Monthly, Volume 8, June, 1873, page 536, from the report of a meeting of the Philadelphia County Homœopathic Society.
"Silphium lac.—Dr. G. A. Hall, in the April number of the Medical Investigator gives a summary of a proving. (The first decimal trituration was given in doses of two grains gradually increased to ten grains every two hours.)
"It produces a scraping, tickling and irritation of the fauces and throat; nausea, sick, faint feeling and a sense of goneness in the epigastrium; a desire to hawk and scrape the throat, throwing off a thin viscid mucus. The irritation extends up the posterior nares, involving the mucous membrane of the nasal passages, producing sneezing, followed by a discharge of limpid, acrid mucus from the nose, attended with constriction and pressure in the supra-orbital region. Engorgement and thickening of the mucous membrane of the throat as far down as could be seen; rough cough, attended with the expectoration of yellow mucus; contraction and tightness of lungs, constant disposition to raise; hacking, spasmodic cough; tongue covered with whitish slimy coat attended with dry sensation as if burned with hot soup; urine high colored and scant, frequent passages with sense of heat at the meatus urinarius during passage of urine; stools natural in form but covered with whitish, slimy mucus. An internal feverish sensation; pulse not accelerated; want of appetite.
"Clinical Observation. For ten years, I have used silphium in asthma with large quantities of stringy mucus, in influenza, coryza, catarrh, and believe it to be the best remedy we have in phthisis when gray or yellow mucus is expectorated copiously, causing rapid exhaustion. I use the second decimal trituration in one or two-grain doses every two hours until expectoration is diminished perceptibly and then at intervals of four or six hours until expectoration is diminished to a degree consistent with other symptoms of the case."
In spite of this good start, rosin-weed did not have any better fortune with the homœopaths than with the eclectics. It never got into the text books. After transient popularity in the journals, it sank back into obscurity and has remained as a remedy for asthma in the memory of a few of the older practitioners from whom it is occasionally handed on by oral tradition.
It was in 1872 when rosin-weed was enjoying its brief publicity and when the epidemic of epizoötic among the horses created a public interest in veterinary medicines, that my father, Dr. Alexander H. Laidlaw, discovered its remarkable curative power in hay fever, as related in Chapter II.