Request for Cure for Epilepsy.

Problems: 
Preparations: 

Editor Ellingwood's Therapeutist:

You have requested that readers of your journal, THE THERAPEUTIST, contribute at least one fact during the year. Now for mine, which is that all the vaunted remedies for epilepsy fail to cure. Having a case in my own family I have very naturally hunted through medical literature for a remedy or remedies, and have uniformly met with a disappointment. In one instance I was "buncoed" out of $260 by a reputable (?) physician who wrote for the journals, and professed to be able to make a cure by a Serum remedy, and as a professional favor I got about a gallon of the stuff or enough to make a cure for $200. When this was gone I paid $60 for about one-half gallon more. In using this serum we got the usual effect of the bromides, eruption and all, with deep hebetude, for which, especially the eruption, he advised Fowler's solution. I could have used the bromides for about $2.60 and have produced the same effects and have gotten a suppression but no cure of the disease.

Now what I wish to enquire is whether you through your journal or otherwise could recommend a remedy which would give some promise of a cure or amelioration of this most intractable malady. I have noticed in the journals "verbenin" spoken favorably of, and today I thought to look up this remedy in your Materia Medica and Therapeutics, but failed to find any reference to verbena or verbenin as a cure for this disease.

No one but those who have some dear one affected with this disease can appreciate the horror of it.

I am a strong believer in the specificity of medicines, and though graduated from an old school college 41 years ago, yet for the past 25 years have studied somewhat closely both eclectic and homeopathic works and had many fine results with the Schussler tissue remedies. I have been thinking recently of Schussler's magnesium phos. for epilepsy, but so far have given it no fair trial.

THOS. B. TURNBAUGH, M. D.


Ellingwood's Therapeutist, Vol. 2, 1908, was edited by Finley Ellingwood M.D.