THUJA OCCIDENTALIS [Thuj]:

- M.L.Tyler.

Arbor Vitae.

Introduction:
Arbor vita !-indeed a "Tree of Life,. for the healing of the nations!" as we shall see. Hahnemann says that no serious medical employment was made of this plant" before now". He says "the pure effects of this uncommonly powerful medicinal substances will be regarded by the Homoeopathic practitioner as a great addition to his medicinal treasury in some of the most serious disease of mankind, for which hitherto there has been no remedy.": He specifies it as "the only efficacious remedy" for fig-warts and gonorrhoea. He used the 30th potency, and then found that in the 60th potency, :"it had not sunk to complete powerlessness *Hahnemann began with strong tinctures and only as experience led the way,. worked gradually up to "Potentization": when he found, as here, that drugs in extreme sub-division, instead of becoming powerless,became more intensely charged with their healing virtue-ED, but on the contrary had rather become even more intensely charged with the medicinal virtue of Thuja". Thuja produces intense headaches and neuralgias. It affects especially the left temple. Its characteristic pain is" sensation of a nail being driven into head". It affects the kidneys, with frequent urination and all sorts of pathological urine including sugar; also urine like water (Ign). It has great action on anus and genitalia:-anus fissured, painful to touch, often with warts, "sometimes immense numbers of flat, moist, mucous tubercles or Condylomata around anus, especially in sycotic subjects." Sweat about genitalia; offensive. Warty and cauliflower excrescences about genitalia; offensive. Warty and cauliflower excrescences about anus and genitalia. It has the severe backache of small-pox, for which it has proved a most useful remedy,being one of the drugs that produces and cures pustular eruptions,. That Thuja can produce warts, we had a curious proof years ago. One of our horse had a few warts,and scars where warts, probably, had been cauterized at some time or other. The coachman was given a small bottle of Thuja O, with instructions to put some of this into water, to bathe the warts. He misunderstood,and put the lot into the horse's drinking water, and presently there was a most extraordinary exemplification of the Thuja warts, their character, and their most typical situations. One of Hahnemann's black letter symptoms is, "On exposure of the body to warm air,shivering all over. Rigor with much yawning,the warm air feels cold to him, and the sun seems to have no power to warm him." Thuja has peculiar sweats,oily sweetish, fetid: and a unique condition of "profuse sweat only on uncovered parts. This has suggested the curative use of Thuja in diverse diseases and conditions, reported from time to time in our literature. It was the determining symptom in a case of myositis ossificans: where it made an extraordinary change in the case and started de=-ossification. Mentally, Thuja makes mistakes in reading and writing. Speaks slowly, as if at a loss for the words: has "prolonged thought fullness about the rest trifles". Has fixed ideas, as if the body were brittle and would easily break; when walking, as if legs were made of wood; as if a live animal were in abdomen (Croc); as if under the influence of a superior power. Uneasy sleep with dreams:-of falling from a height-of head people, ,etc. KENT describes the typical Thuja patient sickly-looking, with waxy face, that looks as if smeared over with grease. The perspiration is peculiar,sweetish-strong-pungent. He says that Arsenic is often the acute, and Thuja the chronic remedy, as in asthma; here cases i which Arsenic would seem to be the remedy,but it only palliates,Thuja or Natrum sulph, will take. up the work and cure. And here they may do so by bringing back a primitive manifestations that has been Suppressed. He describes the Thuja wart-like excrescences,soft and pulpy and very sensitive: burn,itch and bleed easily when rubbed by the clothing. Cauliflower excrescences in vagina, on cervix uteri,about anus and mucous membranes generally. "Herpes everywhere, with excessive neuralgia pains. . . . . "Thuja leads all medicine for symptoms coming from suppressed fig-warts. "It is a pre-eminently strong medicine for case where you have in the history snake-bite, small-pox, vaccination.` But to Dr.James Compton BURNETT with his theory of "Vaccinosis: belongs the honour of having brought Thuja within the range of practical politics as regards our everyday needs. He used to say that Thuja was worth L200 a year to him. CLARKE also acknowledges its very wide usefulness: "People are all vaccinated and drink tea, :"he used to say, "and Thuja is the great antidote to tea and vaccination. Burnett, in the preface to his brilliant and epoch-making little monograph, Vaccinosis and Homoeoprophylaxis, writes, "Truth is not Truth save only to the Infinite; to the mind of mortal man. Truth is not necessarily Truth, but only that which appears to be true. Hence that which is a glorious truth to one man is inglorious nonsense to another, and both individuals may be equally honest of purpose and of like earnestness in their search after Truth. The idea of using Thuja occidentalis as here recommended is not new, nor is it peculiar to the writer, though it is but very little known in this country,and still less acted upon,and hence it is hoped that the publication of these pages may help to establish vaccinosis as a form of disease,. and Thuja as one of its chief remedies.: Burnett concedes that vaccination does protect, to a very large extent, from small-pox; he is no anti-vaccinator: his aim is "to show (!) that there exists a diseased state of the constitution which is engendered by the vaccinial virus (the so-called lymph), which he proposes to call VACCINOSIS, OR THE Vaccinial state; and (2) that there exists also in nature a notable remedy for said Vaccinosis, viz. the Thuja occidentalis; and (3) that thuja is a remedy for Vaccinosis by reason of its homoeopathicity thereto; and (4) that the law of similars also applies to to the prevention of disease." "Vaccinosis," for Burnett, does not mean the acute reaction to vaccination, the febrile state,the local phenomena at the point where the pus was inserted-not even a general varioloid eruption following vaccination. He says, "all this is included in his term vaccinosis, but not merely this:- but also the profound and often long-lasting morbid constitutional state engendered by the vaccine virus:- Lymph., of course,it is not, but pus. The protective power of vaccination is due to diseased of the body. "One suffering from vaccinosis may not be ill in the ordinary sense. But he must be in subdued morbid state, he has been blighted,or he is no vaccinosis" and he says that some of his worse cases of vaccinosis were those in whom the vaccinate did not"take". He has noticed that: not a few persons date their ill- health from a so-called unsuccessful vaccination." And he claims that ""taking 'is the constitutional reaction whereby the organism frees itself more or less from inserted virus. Where as if the person does not make and the virus has been absorbed, the taking becomes a chronic process- paresis,neuralgia, cephalalgia, pimples,acne, etc." Burnett's little book is full of wonderful cases that bear out this theory: and we who follow-on, have delightful experiences of our own to relate, which further prove his proposition. Here are, in brief,some of his cases. A dying body, ghastly,collapsed:suddenly taken ill only a few hours previously,. It was found that the (new) wet-nurse had a recently vaccinated arm which was "a little painful". Burnett pondered the strange case, and gave Thuja 6 to both babe and nurse. Result, the baby next morning was still pale, but practically well, and the vaccinial vesicles on the nurse's arm had withered: they proceeded to dry up completely,and never became pustular. The baby continued well. [We once saw a case of very severe illness after vaccination in a baby, high temperature, eruption all over body, while the area of vaccination was in the vesicle stage. Thuja promptly cured the infant-it was practically well next day: and there was no pustulation,and no scarring. So, Thuja is AN ANTIDOTE TO VACCINATION in its early,acute stage.] Among Burnett's cases are. Middle-aged man: eczema for 20 years with a Pustular eruption on leg. The eczema dated from a re-vaccination twenty years before. Thuja 30x cured. The pustules at once began to wither , and patient,"too busy to come himself", sent word later that his skin was well. Young lady,. after re-vaccination got an eruption on thin involving lower lip. She had to wear a dense veil to hide the repulsive disfiguration. Thuja 30x cured in a fortnight, leaving no thickening of skin and no scar. Post-orbital neuralgia of twenty years' standing:- even good Homoeopathy had failed to touch it. Her "existence was one life- long crucifixion". She came "in utter despair". Burnett found that she had been vaccinated five or six times, and he gave Thuja 30x - which cured. The neuralgia disappeared slowly. About six weeks later he was able to record, "The eyes are well". A year later she wrote him, that she had been in very much better health" and except open or two attempts at a return of the enemy, I have been quite free from suffering." Chronic headache of nine years' duration. Head attacks one or twice a week. Very severe,constricting and bursting headaches. He gave first Graphites: when a red tender patch appeared over right eye,with two or three white-headed pustules. Then discovering that she had been vaccinated at three months, re- vaccinated at seven and fourteen years, and had small-pox about ten years go he gave Thuja. She started improving; then became actually ill with fever, nausea and perspiration. Then pimples broke out on face and in different parts of the body, which filled with pus, and died away. The symptoms were said to resemble those of her attack of small-pox. The headaches were well before this bout came on, and a couple of years later Burnett learned that the cure held good. No more headaches. He gives cases of glands--hairless patches,--habitual influenza with ill-health and headaches, where the patient had been successfully vaccinated four times--of acne, face and nose, nasal dermatitis, after unsuccessful re-vaccination--neuralgia of right eye in a man who, when asked re vaccination seemed frightened, "I should not like to be vaccinated again!" because his last vaccination had made him so ill for a month--of diseased finger nails--of paresis (vaccinated six or seven times, when it never took),--of spinal irritation, a severe case with sickness and disability, had been vaccinated four times and a fifth un- successfully--of arrested development and hemiparesis--and a number of others showing the wide range of Thuja, and its amazing curative powers; the indications being less the present actual symptoms, for which Thuja might or might not be thought of, but the symptoms of the original malady, now latent and chronic, the fons et origo. Burnett's "Vaccinosis" is rendered easily comprehensible by going back to Hahnemann. Even Burnett never seems to have grasped the true inwardness of the matter:--i.e. that vaccination can, to a certain extent, protect from, or modify small-pox because the vaccinate had been endowed with a similar chronic parasitic disease, which renders him, more or less, immune from that "like" disease, small-pox. Hahnemann tells us that, two similar diseases cannot repel one another; nor can they, like dissimilar diseases, suspend one another; nor can two similar diseases exist together in the same organism, to form a double, complex disease. No--two diseases (different in kind, but very similar in symptoms and effects) will annihilate one another when they meet in the organism; the new, stronger morbific power, because of its similitude, will take possession of precisely the parts affected by the weaker, which is consequently annihilated--when vital force remains affected only--temporarily--by the new morbific influence. Probably the modern explanation would be that the chronic disease to be kept in abeyance, must call forth the protective mechanisms of the body, which are therefore on tap for the repulse of a "similar" foe. The manner of infection, and the after-history of the vaccinate, answers Hahnemann's postulates regarding his chronic parasitic diseases:-- Infection takes place in a moment. Then follows a quiescent period, till the whole organism, being infected, reacts vigorously, and endeavours to throw out the disease on to the skin:--at the place of entry of infection. Then, after a more or less violent reaction, the body ceases to struggle, and accommodates itself to a kind of latent toleration, in which, though no longer infectious, the organism lives on, scotched, not kind, to influence adversely the whole life-history of its host, together with his reactions to diseases and drugs:--in such way that the latter, even when homoeopathically indicated, having helped at first, help less and less, and finally fail to cure,--because not corresponding to the under- lying cause of the patient's continued ill-health. Burnett's Vaccinosis--a state of indefinite, chronic ill-health, takes different forms in different individuals according to their personal make-up: one becoming asthmatic--another epileptic--while others develop stomach or joint conditions--and others, again, neuralgias, or life-long headaches. Such cases are puzzling and baffling--terribly resistant to treatment--and never to be unlocked without the key that fits--Thuja . . . THUJA, that wonderful antidote to vaccination, alike in its acute and chronic forms; in those much vaccinated, or who have been excessively affected by vaccination, or again, those who have failed to "take", i.e. to react acutely to the implanted virus. These last, as we have shown, being, in Burnett's experience, the worst cases. Hahnemann gives us only 634 symptoms of Thuja, but the drug has been extensively proved since his day--often in the potencies, and Allen's Encyclopedia gives no less than 3,370 symptoms (with, as usual, authorities for each symptom). In these later careful re-provings on one hundred persons of both sexes, we find that Thuja has caused, in sensitive persons, such serious conditions as asthma, epileptic convulsions, lumps in the breast: so it not only does, but should cure these things, with or without Burnett's "vaccinosis" thrown in to give the casting vote. Thuja is also responsible for the most terrific headaches--for skin troubles,--and has determined, reproduced and cured urethral and other discharges. Some of these things you cannot touch without Thuja. Then gonorrhoeal rheumatism. One has seen a case of rheumatoid arthritis (? gonorrhoeal in origin), where Thuja did wonders in loosening up the joints, and restoring locomotion and power, when other, seemingly-indicated, remedies had failed. Clarke has a striking article on Thuja in his Dictionary, well worth reading. He gives the gist of Burnett's little book, with many observations of his own. Hering's Guiding Symptoms also gives interesting Thuja cases, some after vaccination. But where I imagine that I am "going one better" than the lot, is by trying to put forward the theory that why vaccinosis is what it is, and why it can do what it can do in the way of vitiating health, is because it is one of Hahnemann's CHRONIC PARASITIC DISEASES. Nothing else will completely account for its course--or its cure. And now for a few recent cases, in one's own ken, which still further widen one's knowledge of the curative virtues of Thuja; prescribed on the basis of Burnett's Vaccinosis and its great remedy Thuja, and on Hahnemann's conception of the parasitic nature of chronic diseases; passed with merely a shrug of the shoulders, and regarded as a stumbling-block and rock of offence, till Science took the matter in hand to demonstrate its truth. These cases will be found detailed in my pamphlet Hahnemann's Conception of Chronic Diseases as caused by Parasitic Micro- Organisms. We will only give them briefly as quoted in a letter to one of the big medical journals, which roused the interest of the Editor, but not sufficiently to secure its insertion. This letter pointed out: "In regard to Professor Maitland's Presidential address to the Pathological Society of Manchester (to which you refer in your issue of October 29th, 1932), and his suggestion that resistance to vaccination after recovery from infection might depend on the PERSISTENCE OF THE LIVING VIRUS in the tissues:--it is interesting to note that a similar suggestion was made by Hahnemann one hundred years ago--in regard to all Chronic Diseases:--and that homoeopathic practice, based on that theory, is producing results which appear to confirm it. "Our great antidote to vaccination is Thuja occidentalis, which will abort vaccination, as we have seen, and which proves powerfully curative in chronic conditions of persons who have been repeatedly vaccinated, often without result, or have been made very ill by vaccination and `never been well since.' "Here are a few cases. Small girl, ever since vaccination, pustules on legs, or alternately, when these disappeared, epileptic fits. Thuja quickly cured. "Small boy, purulent onychia, very intractable. Nail removed and thumb healed. Then abscesses in different parts of the body, till it was discovered that he had been eight times vaccinated by a persistent and conscientious G.P. Thuja promptly ended the trouble. "Woman of twenty-nine, epileptic fits at least once a week, with (for Aura) a Thuja symptom, `Before attacks ears feel numbed'. 27* She had other Thuja symptoms, worse for onions, which provoke an attack next morning: drops in sleep. Twice vaccinated, the last took badly. After the first dose of Thuja, in `high' homoeopathic potency, the fits entirely stopped for the ten months she was under observation. She said,`I don't have them now.' "Woman of sixty. Blinding headaches all her life. Vaccinated three times, last took very badly: `laid up with it, and delirious.' She was given Thuja. A month later, `only one head- ache, and not a bad one; putting on weights. But `breathless, as when vaccinated, and bones have been aching, as when vaccinated'. The return of old symptoms, on the road to extinction, proves the remedy. Patient had lost headaches, had put on 8 lb., and was returning to work when last heard of five months later. She had, what most of these Thuja patients have, sensations rousing her from sleep, of dropping into a bottomless pit. "A nurse, thirty-nine. Severe attacks of asthma for two years: they last three to four days, when she can hardly breathe. Vaccinated five times, the last did not take. She got Thuja, in high potency. Result: no asthma at all for three and a half years: then a return, and again Thuja. That was nine months ago, and not heard of since. "Girl of nineteen. Discharge between, or instead of periods. Vague symptoms, but quite unlike herself in behaviour. Vaccinated once eighteen months ago and had very high temperature and ill for fourteen days, the arm only being red for one day. It was said to have `taken internally. She got Thuja. A month later, the doctor who sent her up wrote:`Miss H. is cured': and her mother wrote: `She is quite well and jolly. She had been so unlike herself in her behaviour to me that I had wondered if it were the vaccination. "Woman, fifty-nine, boils on and off for six years. Worse about vulva and anus. Began with a carbuncle. Inoculations for typhoid. Vaccinated four or five times, `doesn't take as a rule'. Was given Thuja. Under observation for nine months, and still `No further trouble. Hope they are things of the past.' "Woman with grown-up children. Eruption between toes, then wrists, then palms: now also on soles and sides of feet: very irritable, especially feet at night. A touch starts the itching. Vaccinated three times. Thuja. Her daughter, a doctor, wrote six days later, `No trouble at all since taking the first powder, so grateful. Eruption all fading away, no new ones coming.' Thuja had ended it. "Years of incapacitating headaches in the mother of a very noisy family of young children. Much vaccinated. Was given Thuja. This was some thirty years ago. Seen recently. `Never had a recurrence of those headaches.' "Woman of forty-seven. Gassed during the war, asthma same night and again in 1921. Now (1931), asthma every two months, or more often. Remedies losing effect. Drops in sleep. Vaccinated lots of times, never seems to take. Thuja. No attack for four months, her longest spell without asthma. Now, with a cold, a bad attack and Thuja repeated. In this case it was ten years of asthma at least every two months, practically well for eighteen months (`only one real attack after four months, and two slight threatenings'). "Miss X. Asthma for seven years, hay fever for fifteen years. Mother has asthma: father had asthma. T.B. history, mother's side. Asthma started after a very bad vaccination seven years previously. Had been treated by injections. Thuja. The happy condition of `no asthma' thereupon lasted a whole year, and the medicine did not need to be repeated. For the whole Summer, no asthma and no hay fever. Then, thirteen months later, for a slight return, Thuja was repeated, since when she has remained `extraordinarily fit'. "Wee boy of three. Comes as mentally deficient. Very dirty: incontinence of stool and urine by night. Ate a dog's faeces. At the children's hospital the mother was told `You can't replace brains: he will never be normal.' Was vaccinated and did not take: done again at nine months. Mother had also, before his birth, a filthy discharge (? gonorrhoeal), another indication for Thuja. He was given Thuja, with almost miraculous results. Already, four weeks later, `Wonderfully better. Wonderfully different. Understands what you say, talks: getting fatter. Sleeps better. Very observant, asks "What's that?--What's that?" Had a birthday party four days ago, and was as normal as any- body.' Mother says, `The Great Ormond Street doctor said, "You cannot replace brains"--but you have!' Another month; plays about the room and chatters. When his mother calls him to have his coat on says, `Just a minute, Mummie!' But of course this was not a real case of mental deficiency, merely arrested development--no longer arrested, thanks to Hahnemann, Burnett and Thuja. "But a word of warning. If any one desires to repeat these experiments, he must remember that he is using a homoeopathic remedy, whose preparation and posology are absolutely different from the remedies he is in the habit of using. If you desire to produce an effect on a patient, to make him sleep, sweat, vomit, or to dull pain, you must give the dose that will to that extent do violence to his organism. But the remedy of `like symptoms' is merely a vital stimulus, to start in the patient curative reaction, and requires to be given only in the minimal infrequent dose that has been established by 100 years of experience as being the most suitable for the purpose. You are using cell- poisons: and here, according to the Arndt-Schultz law, large doses may be lethal, smaller doses inhibit, while smallest doses stimulate." And now a word of warning to homoeopaths in regard to Thuja. It is not a safe drug in careless or ignorant hands. The "Thuja- disease", where the remedy is persisted in, may also become chronic, according to Kent. We will quote He says, in regard to Thuja: "If you repeat again and again, you will have that which will remain a lifetime. Crude drugs do not impress the vital force so lastingly: but an individual who is thoroughly sensitive and properly sensitive, as sensitive as contagion, then if you undertake to prove (in potency) by giving it night and morning, you will rivet upon him a lifelong miasm." Always, the greater the power the greater its capabilities for good and evil, and the more the knowledge needed for its employment. And I think we have proved that Thuja is, as Hahnemann says, "an uncommonly powerful medicinal substance . . . useful in some of the most serious diseases of mankind. for which hitherto there has been no remedy."
BLACK LETTER SYMPTOMS
Nervous, sycotic or syphilitic headaches. White, scaly dandruff; hair dry and falling out. Ophthalmia neonatorum. Condylomata at ANUS. Anus fissured, painful to touch, often with warts, sometimes immense numbers of flat, moist, mucous tubercles or condylomata surround anus, especially in syphilitic subjects. Prostatic affections from suppressed or badly treated gonorrhoea. Gonorrhoea; scalding when urinating, urethra swollen; urinal stream forked; discharge yellow, green, watery; with warts, red erosions on glans; subacute and chronic cases, especially when injections have been used and prostate is involved. Condylomata, mucous tubercles, sycotic cauliflower excrescences- -; fig-wards, smelling like old cheese or herring brine. Warts, condylomata and other excrescences about vulva. Condylomata moist, suppurating, stinging and bleeding. SLEEPLESSNESS; sees apparitions on closing eyes; parts lain on painful; from heat and restlessness; from mental depression; after re-vaccination. Wart-like excrescences on back of hand, on chin and on other places. Warts and condylomata, large, seedy and pedunculated; some-times oozing moisture and bleeding readily.
QUEER SYMPTOMS
Body feels very thin and delicate: frail, easily broken: as if made of glass. As if a living animal were in abdomen. "Nail" sensations, driven into, or out from parts of brain. As if abdominal muscles were pushed out by arm of a child. As if boiling lead were passing through rectum. As if anus would fly to pieces during stool. As if moisture, or a drop were running through urethra. As if legs were made of wood: or elongated. Stinging and stitching pains, in various parts of body. Coldness through length of spine: in arms. Burning; scalp, eyes, lids, small of back to between scapulae, etc. "A surplus of producing life; nearly unlimited proliferation of pathological vegetations, condylomata, warty sycotic excrescences, spongy tumours. All morbid manifestations are excessive, but appear quietly, so that beginning of diseased state is scarcely known." Rheumatism : flesh feels beaten off bones. Bad effects from vaccination. Luxuriant growth of hair on parts otherwise not covered by hair. Skin looks dirty : cannot be washed clean. (Psor.) Warts, condylomata, large, seedy, pedunculated, sometimes ooze moisture and bleed readily. Eruptions only on covered parts, burn violently after scratching. Sweat only on uncovered parts, while covered parts were dry and hot.