Zincum metallicum
von E. B. Nash — Leaders in Typhoid Fever
Historical reference for practitioners and students. The statements below reflect the named author’s homeopathic teaching and do not establish treatment effectiveness. This text is not medical advice and must not replace appropriate diagnosis or care.
CEREBRAL TYPHUS AND ITS REMEDIES
CLINICAL CASE. ZINCUM METALLICUM
Zincum metallicum is also a remedy which comes to our help in the last stage of these desperate brain cases. Allow me once more to quote a case from my own work, Leaders in Homœopathic Therapeutics, which will show its power here. (See page 145.)
A young lady about twenty years of age complained a week before I was called of weakness, or feeling of general prostration; headache and loss of appetite, but the greatest complaint was of prostration.
She was a student, and her mother, who was an excellent nurse, attributed all her sickness to overwork at school and tried to rest and “nurse her up.” But she continued to grow worse. I prescribed for her Gelsemium, and followed it with Bryonia according to indications, and she ran through a mild course of two weeks longer, and seemed convalescing quite satisfactorily.
Being left in a room alone, while sleeping and perspiring, she threw off the clothes, caught cold and relapsed. Of course the “last state of that patient was worse than the first.” The bowels became enormously distended, profuse hemorrhage occurred, which was finally controlled by Alumen. A low form of delirium came on, the prostration became extreme notwithstanding the hemorrhage was checked, until the following picture obtained:
Staring eyes rolling upward, head retracted; complete unconsciousness; lying on back and sliding down in bed, twitching, or rather intense, violent trembling all over, so that she shook the bed. I had nurses hold her hands night and day, she shook and trembled so; hippocratic face, extremities deathly cold to knees and elbows, pulse so weak and quick I could not count it and intermittent; in short, all signs of impending paralysis of the brain. The case seemed hopeless, but I put ten drops of Zincum metallicum 200th (B. & T.) in two drams of cold water and worked one half of it between her set teeth, a little at a time, and an hour after the other half. In about an hour after the second dose she turned her eyes down and faintly said, “Milk!” Through a bent tube she swallowed a half glass of milk, the first nourishment she had received in twenty-four hours. She got no more medicine for four days, and improved steadily all the time. She afterwards received a dose of Nux vomica, and progressed rapidly to a perfect recovery.”
I have now given three remedies that have, prominently, general trembling, Gelsemium, Apis mellifica and Zincum met. Several others have this symptom, but not so persistently or intensely as these. Gelsemium trembling occurs almost wholly in the first week, and the other two in the third or fourth week.