A Sulphur case
By Dr. Hesse

In the spring I was called to see young W., a boy eight years of age. His mother had noticed some four months before that his abdomen was becoming distended, and the family physician had diagnosed it as peritonitis with copious exudation. When this increased and caused difficulty in respiration, the surgeon who was called in, by lancing, drew off about two quarts of serum with pus. This procedure had to be repeated in four weeks. In the meanwhile efforts were made to alleviate the disease by other measures also, as by the injection of Koch’s serum, but without success. The surgeon diagnosed the disease as tuberculosis peritonitis, and since he, as well as the family physician, gabve an unfavourable prognosis, the father told them that he felt it  to be his duty to look elsewhere for help, either to hydropathy or to Homeopathy; the family physician then directed him to me (probably as the lesser evil).

I found the boy much emaciated, whose distended abdomen, owing to this fact, was doubly striking. The abdomen was extraordinarily distended, a real drum, the navel protruded, and percussion everywhere gave an empty sound, except in the region of the umbilicus. The other notes taken at my first visit are as follows:

Strength not low. After having been vaccinated in his second year, there had follwed eruptions on the head and suppuration in the axilla. Even before that he had been subject to wetting the bed and to nose bleeding. Since his sickness began he had been subject to diarrhoea, especially in the forenoon, three or four stools of light grey matter attended with colic. Colic is frequent, aggravated toward evening. About this time he also complains of the room being too hot. His feet often feel too hot; he stretches them out from under the cover. Fever with hardly any interruption, between 101° and 103°. Disturbed sleep. He is peevish.

Anyone would at once recognize in this the image of Sulphur, the past and the present supplementing each other. Eruptions on the head, wetting the bed, epistaxis, diarrhoea in the forenoon, grey stools, hot feet with the desire of stretching them out from under the cover – everything shows the characteristics of Sulphur. To act directly on the local process of exudation, I prescribed two drops of the 3 potency, three times a day.

The effect of the medicine on the stools showed itself in a day or two, as these became normal, so also the disposition and sleep left nothing more to be desired. The appetite improved. The fever, colic and sensitiveness of the abodomen during percussion disappeared more slowly, it required four weeks. Later on I used the second decimal potency of Sulphur.

More slowly still came the diminution of the exudation, yet there was a manifest improvement from week to week. As the exudation diminished uneven prominences in the abdomen appeared, evidently caused by the draining off of the exudation; these slowly disappeared. At my last visit in August I noted, first of all, a general state of good health; local examination showed still a slight distension of the abdomen; though his mother averred that his abdomen had always been more prominent than that of the other children. With the exception of a spot as large as the hand below the splenetic region, the sound heard on percussion was everywhere tympanitic; the abdomen was soft with no unevenness except in that one spot.

The result gave me great pleasure; the case was severe and a fatal issue had been prognosticated by others; there was the clear image pointing to a certain remedy, which has been given by itself, and the favourable result could only be ascribed to this same remedy.

Whether the disease was a case of simple peritonitis or of tubercular peritonitis, seemed at first doubtful. Professor Niemeyer says: “Tuberculosis of the peritonaeum is hardly ever found to be primary, but it usually follows on tuberculosis of the lungs or of the bowels, or of the urinary and sexual organs. In other cases it forms part of an acute military tuberculosis.” None of these combinations were found in this case, unless we would claim that the diarrhoea was a tuberculosis of the bowels, which would seem a rather arbitrary assumption. So there would be left nothing but simple peritonitis, or, if we wish to classify it, rheumatic peritonitis, which, as Niemeyer says, is very rare, being hardly ever found in persons healthy before that, and is caused by taking cold or from unknown atmospheric influences.

Sulphur, called by Von Boenninghausen the “divine remedy”, is the remedy most frequently indicated in chronic diseases. The Sulphur constitution is so general that the advice has been given to begin the treatment of every chronic case with Sulphur.