During the afternoon leg weary.
Unusual hearty appetite for supper (the good appetite keeps with me for some days).
A good night's rest following, and have felt much brighter and generally better ever since the first day. (Healing.)
I have no doubt had I repeated the inhalations several times I should have been very sick. It is not necessary to push a proving to extremes. I think Hahnemann did not as a rule. If I were strong I should push this proving, but I dare not. Who will take it up?
(Apropos of the foregoing Dr. G. Hering, of England, made the following suggestions which hint at a possible use of the remedy in tuberculosis):
What curious discoveries are made by the observant! Witness the following remarks of Dr. Casanova, as recorded in the Homœopathic Review of over thirty years ago:
"I know several localities in South America, Africa and Spain where the marsh miasma has unquestionably arrested and cured that fatal scourge of the human race, phthisis pulmonalis, without any other treatment or restriction in food or drink. And why should not the climate of the fen lands of Lincolnshire, in the neighborhood of Spalding, prove as curative an agent for this disease as the climate of so many foreign regions where patients go and die, deprived of all the comforts of a home? Penzance, among the British localities, is reported to be superior to nine-tenths of the places to which patients are sent. Penzance, then, and Spalding should be particularly studied by medical men and recommended to consumptive individuals who wish to enjoy the benefits and advantages of a national place of relief, if not of cure."
Upon reading this I began to reflect upon the limitless nature of science. We never seem to find either beginning or end to it. Circles within circles, and no one can tell what communications there are between those circles. We cannot trace them. We are lost in infinity.
Miasmatic places are the most healthy places—for some of us at least.
Now, I think of it, I find I can give some support to this statement of Dr. Casanova. I was once on board a Liverpool steamer which put into Aspinwall, on the swampy Isthmus of Panama, for nine days. Upon our return home several of the sailors, otherwise healthy fellows, were prostrated by what was called Panama fever, whilst I myself, who had formerly suffered from tubercular disease of the lungs, was totally unaffected.