URTICA URENS [Urt-u]:

- M.L.Tyler.

Introduction:
IN the country it is difficult to get away from stinging nettles. We call them weeds: we belabour them with with sticks: we cut them down with bill-hooks: we dig them up: and in spite of the old saw, "Cut them in June And they come again soon, Cut them in July, You cut them down truly" they are always with us. WHY? Is it perhaps because they are invaluable, and must be at hand for emergencies? Test them! Make an infusion by pouring boiling water on stinging nettles, and cover the burn with clean linen steeped therein, and see! The dictionary calls them "neglected weeds with singing hairs". And yet, no home in town or country should be without stinging- nettle tincture, Urtica urens, if only because of its magic power over. BURNS, for almost instant relief of pain, and rapid healing. (This applies, of course, to fairly superficial burns-"burns of the first and second degrees".) Someone, doing a chemical experiment, exploded a small tube of boiling sulphuric acid (oil of vitriol) into face and eyes. It was quickly washed away, but there were extensive superficial burns, and a corneal ulcer. Good old RUDDOCK, in the Domestic Homoeopathy, advised: and soft rag, moistened with a few drops of Urtica in water quickly wiped the pain out, and healed in a couple of days-so far as the skin was concerned. One remembers as hotel boy, hurried into hospital, having severely scalded his face. He had to be admitted on account of shock, and Urtica was quickly applied. Next morning it was difficult to see where the scalds and been, except on edges of lips, etc., when had not been well covered. Otherwise there was no vesication, and no inflammation. A doctor who could not believe the fairy tales told him regarding this power of Urtica, was advised to "burn his finger and try". He did accidentally burn it a few hours later, and was convinced. The pain went in a few minutes, and it soon healed. One could multiply, indefinitely, instances of the soothing and healing power of stinging nettles in burns. One remembers with a shiver the burnt and scalded children of student days; and their shrieks, day after day, when we were instructed to get the dressings off-stuck to intensely painful wounds. But when one uses Urtica (pace asepsis!) there is no need by removing the dressings, to constantly interfere with healing. Be glad that they do "stick": and merely water them well, from time to time, with Urtica lotion, to cleanse and keep them almost. They will drop off, as healing takes place. I have seen a small ulcer with a surface of pus, heal quickly under the little scab of pus when kept moistened with Urtica. Old burns, also! that have never healed. One small boy came up with terrible scars and contractions on thigh, and with considerable areas still ulcerated. These began to heal rapidly when compresses of Urtica were applied. And a cottage woman, one remembers, where an old burn just above the wrist had refused to heal, did heal promptly under the magic touch of a stinging nettle compress. BUT, There is always a "but" ! Remember, what a remedy can cure, it can cause. And if you use Urtica externally too long, or too strong, you will be surprised to find fresh vesicles, matching those of the burn, outside the burn-area-proving Homoeopathicity. And then?-why, a little soap and water finishes that. But, one grows curious! Evidently a powerful medicinal herb!- what else is it good for? It has long been in domestic use for "gravel, and urinary affections, provoking, as DIOSCORIDES says, urine, and expelling stones out of the kidneys". CULPEPPER, who lived from 1615 to 1654, praises it as a remedy for chest troubles; "to provoke urine and expel the gravel and stone"; to wash" old, rotten or stinking sores, etc." and for GOUT (more of this anon); also for "joint aches in any part-found an admirable help thereunto". But we want to know more than that. We want to know the mischief a drug can do to a sensitive, in order to KNOW what it is capable of curing in a sensitive: a sensitive being a person suffering from "like" symptoms. NETTLE-RASH. Burnett says, "It seems to me that if any honest enquirer is really desirous of putting the truth of Homoeopathy roughly to the test, he need only handle a few nice nettles with gloveless hands, when he will find that nettles do produce nettle-rash; and then if he will treat a few cases of nettle-rash with nettle-tea or tincture, he will find that the nettle really does cure the disease nettle-rash and if that is not homoeopathy, pray what it is?" Urtica has been well proved; and has never been proved, for finer symptoms, in the potencies. But several provings are recorded. One, a most dramatic one, in "a woman who drank two cupfuls of a hot infusion of two ounces of the herb". The result was a most intense urticaria, "with burning, itching, numbness, swelling, oedema and vesication. Face, arms, chest and shoulders were affected-the whole upper part of the body down to the navel. The itching was so intense that the vesicles were scratched off, and exuded large amount of serum. The look of the patient was monstrous: eyelids completely closed; upper lip, nose and ears frightfully swollen". But the most astonishing thing was that " in this woman, who had had no children for 3 years, and who had nursed none of her children, the breasts swelled up and discharged, first serum, then perfect milk; and a very copious secretion of milk lasted for eight days". Other provers got nettle-rash" especially on fingers and hands". (See Allen's Encyclopedia, etc.) We will quote two cases of nettle-rash, showing, inter alia, that the potency is of less importance then the remedy. The first. After a prolonged course of Camembert cheese, there came occasional urticarial swellings of palms; but only when hot with walking. Camembert was suspected and let alone. Again Camembert, as a test, with the same result. Then Camembert was left finally alone. (The was in the early days of the Boer War, about 1900.) Years later (some years after the Great War) in a strange place in the country one afternoon, a cup of tea with goat's milk was drunk. A few hours later, after getting home, terrific irritation began, first in one place, then in another, then every where, till the victim was obliged to retire and tear off her clothes, in agonies of itching from scalp to heels, and she was forced to rub, till black and blue. She had been inclined to laugh at nettle-rash-till then ! Happily Urtica was remembered, and a few drops of the strong tincture in water, sipped, brought speedy relief, and it was all gone by night, never to return since, i.e. in some ten years. A second case. "She looked as if she had fallen, stripped, into a bed of nettles: not an inch free from weals. She got Urtica Urens 10M., one dose, and was clear next morning." LACTATION. Urtica has been used to promote the secretion of milk, and also to suppress it, in women who are weaning. In a case quoted in Clarke's Dictionary, a woman with a lump in her breast was seen six weeks after childbirth, with stinging pain in the lump and in various parts of the body, and with entire absence of milk. Nothing helped of Urtica was given, "when in three days the breasts filled with milk, and the pains were relieved. The breasts had now to be supported and account of their fullness". DELTOID RHEUMATISM. Another notable feature of the provings of Urtica was a very severe right deltoid rheumatism, and Urtica has proved curative in this distressing condition. Dr. Compton Burnett, who had a perfect genius for spotting, roughly proving, and making play with rather unusual remedies, tells us a great deal about Urtica urens in his brilliant little monograph on GOUT. It is to him that we owe much of our knowledge of this despised but supremely-useful weed. AGUE-MALARIA. In a charming and characteristic little story, he gives an account of his" first acquaintance with the nettle as a medicine". "Twenty years ago I was treating a lady for intermittent fever of the mild English type, when one day my patient came tripping somewhat jauntily into my consulting room and informed. me that she was quite cured of her fever, and wished to consult me in regard to another matter. I at once turned to my notes of her case, and inquired more closely into the matter of the cure, in order to duly credit my prescribed remedy with the cured, and the more so as ague is not always easily disposed of therapeutically. `Oh!' said the lady, `I did not take your medicine at all, for when I got home I had such a severe attack of fever that my charwoman begged me to allow her to make me some nettle-tea, as that was a sure cure of fever. I consented, and she at once went into our garden, where here are plenty of nettles growing in a heap of rubbish and brickbats, and got some nettles, of which she made me a tea, and I drank it. It made me very hot. The fever left me, and I have not had it since." Burnett adds, "Honour to the charwoman of nettle-tea fame" Burnett continues, "The thing escaped my mind of years, but one day being in difficulty about a case of ague, I treated it with a tincture of nettles and cured it straight away, and my next case also, and my next, and almost every case ever since, with very nearly uniform success. Some of my cases of ague cured with nettle tincture were most severe ones, invalided home from India and Burmah. And quite lately a patient in Siam, to whom I had sent a big bottle of nettle tincture, wrote me, `The tincture you sent us has very greatly mitigated the fever we get here. Please order us another bottle.'" "I say almost every case has yielded to Urtica urens; every case, of course, has not." This use is also homoeopathic, for Burnett says," Urtica urens, in my hands, has produced fever over and over again." One sensitive to whom he gave rather large doses of the O reported, "I cannot go on with this medicine, it sets all my pulses beating, makes me terribly giddy as if I were going to topple forwards in my bed, and then a bad headache comes on; and when I take it at night it makes me very feverish." In an Indian officer, suffering from Scinde boils (? of malarial origin), to whom Burnett gave Urtica, this "was followed by a furious outburst of fever, so severe that his condition caused his friends considerable anxiety". But "he made a quick and complete recovery" In another such case, followed by very severe fever with usually long stages, the patient recovered under Nat. mur. Burnett says, "It is distinctly curious to note the remarkable effects of Natrum muriaticum and Urtica urens in gout as well as in ague and malarialism." GOUT. Urtica urens was one of Burnett's great remedies, not only for malaria and ague-cake (he found in it a powerful "splenic", but also" for its gravel-expelling power" and for gout. He says, "Patients under the influence of small material doses of Urtica will often pass quantities of gravel"; (one of his patients" used to point to a spot under her spleen as her gravel pit") and he says, "when I observed others who, being under the influence of Urtica urens, passed grit and gravel pretty freely for the first time in their lives, I came to the conclusion that Urtica possesses the power of eliminating urates from the economy. And it slowly became clear to my mind that Urtica might be the very remedy I had long been in quest of , viz., a quickly- acting, easily-obtained homoeopathic remedy for the ATTACKS of gout, or some of them; for of course we, of experience, never expect uniform results, any more than we expect all the trees of the forest to be of the same height". He says, "I have no faith in gout cures unless they thicken the urine." And he says, "in acute gout, it cuts short the attack in a safe manner, viz., by riding the economy of the disease product, its actual suffering-producing material." His usual way was to give five drops of the mother tincture in a wineglassful of quite warm water, say every two or three hours; and a few hours later he would hear, "Oh! the pain is gone, and I have passed a lot of gravel." Acute gout was more common in his day, than with us: but I remember one case in a lady, whose foot was red and swollen and intensely painful, and who was in the habit of getting gouty attacks. Urtica urens O cured very promptly. For his success in curing acute gout, Dr.Burnett came to be known as "Dr. URTICA" in London West-end Clubland. Then again, for suppression of urine, and uraemia. One remembers a small boy, dying of tubercular meningitis, where the urine was suppressed, and the body had a highly urinous odour. A few drops of the strong tincture of stinging nettles caused the passage of urine, and the odour disappeared, and life was, protem., prolonged. The same restoration of the urinary function was seen in a case of uraemia in the hospital a few years ago. Burnett's little book is crowded with brilliant cases, told in his inimitable style; we are here giving only the results of his experiences. As said, he used Urtica "in small material doses", repeated pretty frequently (since they were acute illness) for some days. In the course of his so using the remedy he got, as we have seen some pretty severe provings in some of his patients, which show the homoeopathicity of the drug: as able to cause, as well as to cure. It was in exactly this way that Hahnemann started, originally, when administering his "similars". Then he had to dilute, to avoid severe aggravation; this especially where poisonous drugs were concerned. Then, going further and further in attenuation-as it seemed!- he discovered that Dilutions became Potencies. Poor and culpepper! how surprised he would have been to learn that he was advocating Homoeopathy an odd hundred years before its time!-just as Moiere's Bourgeois Gentilhomme was enchanted with the wonderful news that he had been speaking prose all his life ! But Culpepper only tells what he knew had cured. While we know that what will cure, will also cause. By the way, if you are being stung by a mosquito, don't smack it dead on your face, thus expressing its maximum poison: but flick it off lightly. In the same way, if you have the misfortune to be badly stung by nettles, don't "rub it in" but pass a sharp knife lightly over the painful places, after the manner of shaving, and so extract those little terrors, the poison hairs. After all this, I think we shall all GRASP THE NETTLE; remembering that it is only out of sufferings that we can ever extract CURE. The strong tincture of Arnica applied to a wasp sting, prevents the pain and swelling, and in a couple of hours the sting is forgotten. Urtica is said to do likewise for bee stings. And Cantharis 200, given internally, quickly cures the inflamed and horrible swellings that may follow gnat bites.

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