Vol. 23 No. 3 June 2003

by Bruce Barwell

This article, and the previous one (on Mancinella), had its origin when I began to wonder if the frequently cited Mancinella keynote “fears is going mad” was in fact a valid prescribing pointer – especially in the absence of other symptoms.

My search began with consulting Allen’s Encyclopedia – nothing in the provings, etc, summarised there supports “fears going mad”. Next I read Hering’s Condensed Materia Medica, both in English and in its German incarnation as Kurzgefasste Arzheimittellehre. “Fear of going crazy” and “Fürchtet den Verstand zu verlieren” in the other. The latter is not an accurate translation; or did the initial translation go from German to English? The English edition came out in 1877, the German in 1889 – but Hering may have written a parallel German manuscript for the later publication right from the start of the writing project. Anyway, the German has the meaning of “Fear of losing reason”.

What about old repertories? Knerr (1896) does not have Mancinella under “Crazy, fear of becoming” or “Crazy, as if going”. Under “Fear of becoming crazy” there is “Manc; with vertigo and nervous excitability”. The 1890 Gentry’s Concordance entry has “Crazy. – Fears of becoming c. Chelid., Mancin.” “Declares she will go c. Chelid., Cimicif.”

After this came a reading of Hering’s Guiding Symptoms of 1879. Here is what it says:

Mind. l Sudden vanishing of thoughts, forgets from one moment to the next what she wishes to do.
l Everything becomes irksome.
l Fear of getting crazy; of evil spirits; of being taken by the devil.
l Averse to work and answering questions.
l l Melancholy, homesickness; about midnight attacks of fear and trembling; afraid of evil spirits, of being taken hold of by the devil; sleeplessness; pressing in cardiac region, hard beats of heart, followed by faintishness, with darkening before eyes; tetters. θMental derangement.
Bashful and taciturn; has a timid look.
Aggravation from anger and after eating.
Sensorium. Vertigo: stupefying; with loss of conciousness; in morning on rising from bed.
l Sensation of lightness in head while walking about room.

What do the symbolic marks mean? A solid vertical bar means verified by cures, two thin bars mean a symptom frequently confirmed or fitting a genius symptom of the remedy and the means a symptom or condition removed from a patient who had taken the remedy.

Which leads to the need for an explanation of the special features of Hering’s Guiding Symptoms. Bönninghausen’s repertories are not mere indexes to symptoms created in provings: remedies are graded largely according to experience of their use in the real world of illness – for example the proving of a remedy may be full of sore tooth symptoms, but in practice was near-useless at treating teeth, so it does not get a high grading.

Hering carried this idea on to a materia medica. He made extraordinary efforts to evaluate symptoms from the perspective of their usefulness in getting sick people well. (There is a great need for a modern work with the same plan!) That is why gradings are used, and why what Guiding Symptoms may say about a remedy can be very different from the presentation of materia medicas which just shuffle provers’ reports.

Julian Winston has sent me a copy of the schemata of Mancinella proving symptoms as set out in Hempel’s translation from the French of Benoit-Jules Mure’s collection of Brazilian provings. It is hard to recognise this list as Mancinella symptoms!

MENTAL AND MORAL
Taciturn. Deep repose of mind. Evanescent ideas. Merry. Sadness. Feeling of tenderness. Sad, then merry, dreams.

HEAD
Heaviness and dullness of the head. Lancinating pain in the head. Pain at the head, as if bandaged all round, after thinking. Headache with vertigo, after eating bread in the morning. Pain as from a blow all around the head, when staying in the sun . . .

In 1847 Mr M. E. T. Ackerman, along with pupils at Mure’s school, did the first proving. Ackerman, a brave man, undertook a second proving, seemingly solo this time; the proving was done with tree sap.

After all this searching I can conclude:
1. There are several medicines for the symptom “fears going mad”.
2. It would seem attributing this symptom to Mancinella arises for one case – that of George Bute in 1889.
3. Mancinella fixes “fear of the supernatural”.