MELILOTUS ALBA (Sweet Clover)

Here is a remedy of undoubted great value. The best rendering of it is given by Dr. H. C. Allen in the transactions of the I. H. A., pages 104, year 1887, although a very fair one is found in the “Guiding Symptoms” Hering. The provers all had fearful headaches and hæmorrhages except myself (Bowen).

The congestion to the brain is equal to that of Belladonna and Glonoine, and the most characteristic symptom of such congestion is intense redness of the face, with throbbing carotids, which is often > by a profuse epistaxis. Several years ago I cured a very bad case of mania of the religious form with the 6th potency. This lady had had one similar attack a few years before, when, after she had been given up by two allopaths, who said she must go to the asylum, I relieved her with Stramonium. She was very loquacious at that time.

This time Stramonium failed, but on indication of the intensely red face I gave her Melilotus with a rapid and permanent cure. The first cause of these attacks was overheating in the sun.

One more case will illustrate the action of this truly great remedy.

During a run of typhoid fever in a young lady she had frequent attacks of profuse epistaxis. One attack followed another, sometimes twice or three times in twenty-four hours, until I became alarmed on account of the great loss of blood.

She had been subject to frequent attacks of nosebleed since childhood, from the time she was injured in the nasal passage by a button she pushed up the nose, and which a “regular” claimed, after much violence, to have pushed down her throat, but which in reality remained in her nose a long time—several months—when it was ejected in a fit of coughing and sneezing. Two years before I carried her through a very severe attack of diphtheria, which was also attended by severe nosebleed, occurring at night, the blood hanging in clots from the nose like icicles.

Mercurius sol. 30th then stopped it very nicely. Now the blood clotted some, but not so markedly. Mercurius did no good. Every attack was preceded by the most intense redness and flushing of the face and throbbing of the carotids I ever witnessed. The nosebleed would invariably follow within a few hours this apparent rush of blood to head and face. Belladonna did no good. Neither did Erigeron, which, in Hering, “has congestion of the head, red face, nosebleed and febrile action.”

Melilotus 30th relieved promptly not only these attacks of congestion to head and nosebleed, but the whole case afterward progressed without an untoward symptom to perfect recovery.

F. A. Waddell, M. D., reports a case of pneumonic congestion, in which the characteristic red face and epistaxis were present, as cured with this remedy.

Dr. Bowen, to whom belongs the credit of first introducing this remedy to the profession, reports many cases of headaches, colic, cramps in the stomach and spasms relieved and cured by it. It seems to me that this remedy should be classed with Belladonna and Glonoine, and never forgotten in comparison with remedies having strong head symptoms.