Cases of common ringworm cured by constitutional treatment alone
By Thomas Skinner

At a boarding-school for young ladies, in one of the healthiest neighbourhoods of Liverpool, something very like an epidemic of ringworm made its appearance, to the great disquietude of the lady superintendent. The local medical man (an Allopathic of considerable experience) was called in, and he gave the usual full and particular directions about diet, cleanliness, fresh air, exercise, and the great necessity of isolation in order to prevent extension. In spite of all his directions, dietetical, regiminal, and medicinal, the mischief was not only unchecked, but it actually spread. Besides, the young ladies decidedly objected to being isolated, and, what was very natural, they began to talk to each other, and it is suspected that some of them actually wrote home to their friends.

I was totally unknown to the mistress of the school, but at the suggestion of a lady, a friend of both of us, she was induced to try what homoeopathy could do for the malady.

The first case brought to me was Miss M., aged 156, an exceedingly fine-looking girl, of fair complexion. Her family history was strumous. She was blamed for being intellectually stupid and given to tears, which are very easily excited.

On the back of right thigh, I was shown a large patch of common ringworm, Herpes circinatus. She told me that it itches most violently at all times, worse towards morning in bed. On being asked, she informed me that she had constantly a sensation in her feet and legs as if she had on cold damp stockings, and that she was very liable to chilblains. Menses expected every day. As soon as they are well over, she is to take a powder dry on the tongue of Calcarea carbonica 200 (Epps), every other morning on rising.

28^th October, 1876, fourteen days after visit, and about one week after commencing the treatment, reports herself very much better in every respect, although the patch was still there, but paler, and itching much less. By right I should have gibven no more medicine, but, as they resided a long way off, I repeated the Calcarea 200 every third morning.

17^th November, 1876. Steady improvement, patch all but gone; no itching; cold damp-stocking sensation still present. To continue Calcarea 200 once a week until the appearance of the next menses, by which time the patch had entirely disappeared.

As soon as the proprietrix of the boarding-school saw Miss M. improving, a batch of two or three at a time were brought to me,. As it would be tedious for me and for my readers to give the details of eight or nine cases, all so much alike, I shall content myself by summarizing them.

Besides the case already given of Miss M., there were other seven cases, many of them much worse so far as the extent of the case skin affection is concerned. In two of them it was on the scalp, especially bad about the edges of the hair, having all the appearance of Porrigo scutulata, or Herpes of the hairy scalp. To my views of pathology, Herpes circinatus and Porrigo scutulata are the same in cause and essence, and the one is as easy of cure as the other, without local treatment of any kind. One young lady, of exceedingly fair skin, fat and plump, and about fifteen years old, had several large patches over the left breast and a5rm, also on the neck and thigh. I do not thing that in so few patients I ever saw the disease so general over the body. With two exception, Sulphur and Calcarea cured every case within one month from the commencement of treatment, without isolation, except a\hat two were not allowed to occupy the same bed, whether ill or well, without change of diet, and without the simples or the vilest local application of any kind. It is now one year and four months since I was asked to prescribe for Miss M., and within six weeks the disease was altogether stayed and eradicated from the school. When I was consulted in was spreading. I wonder what the local-parasiticidal-chrysophanic-acid-materialistic physicians have to say to this? Of all the insanities which have ever appeared in medicine there are few to match the parasitic theory of the origin of diseases, hence the blindness of Allopathic physicians, and of “physicians practicing homoeopathy,” to the marvelous doctrine of PSORA – which Egyptian blindness, they take to mean the Acarus scabiei! It is just possible that routine practitioners and pathological prescribers may imagine, that because Sulphur and Calcarea 200 and M m cured these eight cases of ringworm, therefore they are specifics for the disease. They are nothing of the sort; they were specific only to the cases which they cured, tnad they were not given haphazard – each case was carefully individualized and prescribed for according to “minute symptomatic resemblance.” In the first place they were all psoric subjects; perhaps the terms strumous, or scrofulous, or scorbutic, may be less objectionable to some; some of them had symptoms characterisistic of Sulphur, such as a sinking emptiness at epigastrium; worse about 11 a.m. Cold feet or burning hot, the soles especially; hot flushes to the face in the afternoons, and frequent feelings of faintness.  If there is added to these symptoms, chronic headaches, with heat of forehead or of vertex, and having a throbbing tensive character, Sulphur high – and the higher the better – will cure, often in a single dose of C m or M m. In other caes, the key-note was cold-damp and clammy feelings of the hands, and especially of the feet; or still better, the subjective symptom, “as if she had on cold-damp stockings,” of Professor H.N. Guernsey, which is an all but infallible guide to the selection of Calcarea carbonica, under any and every circumstance in disease where the symptom is present; at least, such is my own and the experience of Dr. Guernsey, however disparagingly Dr. Hughes may allude to it in his “Pharmacodynamics,” where Calcarea-c is classed as a very second-rate medicine indeed, whereas it is second only to Sulphur in the estimation of all true Hahnemannians who comprehend and who daily carry out in their practices the doctrine (not theory) of Psora as developed by HAHNEMANN.

One of the cases cured by Sulphur required a dose of Sepia to complete it, and another treated by Calcarea required Carbo vegetabilis to complete it. Both were given in high powers, and according to “minute symptomatic resemblance,” never because of the nosological name, far less because of the insane pathological theory of parasites being the fons et origo mali.

Note. - I do not doubt the existence of parasites in the least, but I look upon them in the light of mere accidents or concomitants of disease. In the relation of cause and effect, they are, in ninety-nine a hundredths of cases, much more likely to be the effect than the cause of disease. The very law of their life, the condition of their being is weakness, disease, decay, and death. If this is the case, and no one doubts it, how can parasites, be the cause of that which is a necessary condition of their own existence, namely, disease. Let the materialists reply if they can!