| Description Of Item | A cylindrical bottle with a wooden stopper containing Aconitum Napellus, prepared by a homeopathic chemist Joseph James, Promenade Place, Cheltenham, who had worked for Arthur Guinness M.D. and undertook the company and changed the name to Joseph James M.P.S (Members of the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, now is The Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain) afterwards.
Aconitum Napellus are also called Monkshood and Wolfsbane, which are spread all over Europe and were indigenous to the Swiss, Carinthian and Styrian Alps, the Pyrenees, the Dauphiny, the mountains of Silesia, Bavaris and the Hartz.
In the flowering time, June and July, the entire plant except the root is chopped and pounded to a pulp, then mingled with an equal part by welght of alcohol and poured into well-stoppered bottle, allowed to stand eight days in a dark, cool place, and then filtered.
It was observed by Dr Ernst Ferdinand Rückert (1846) on an 18 years old girl was in mania and craziness and Aconitum Napellus cured her; it cured two pregnant women’s mania and craziness under the idea of approaching death, which Dr Hahnemann (1846) indicated that Aconitum Napellus was to be employed when the patient is anxious with coldness of body or a burning sensation in the brain.
It was believed to cure simple form of continued fever, attended by shivering, alternate flashes of heat and restlessness, quick pulse and a dry skin, remittent fever, typhus fever, yellow fever with eyes injected or painful feeling of swelling or distension in the pit of the stomach, and when congestion of the head occurs in a full plethoric habit with the face flushed and aversion to light and sounds.
It was also useful for congestion of the chest with difficult breathing, short dry cough, violent pressure and palpitation of the heart, and the nightmare occurs in women and children with feverish heat and anxiety.
It was first administrated when the inflammation followed by fever occurred, which in the bladder, lung, liver, intestines, kidney and heart etc. in addition, it could cure the chronic bronchitis with the inflammatory symptoms during the commencement or at any stage of the diseases, like headache or accelerated pulse.
Also, it was the chief remedy of the pleurisy with sharp, sticking pain in the side when breathing and was preceded by chills and accompanied with more or less fever, thirst; the best remedies for spitting blood, dysentery, neuralgia in the face and head, fever occurred in chicken pox, measles with redness of the eyes and fever, while Dr Lewis Sherman (1878) disagreed that this medicine is useful for the fever of measle, small pox and scarlet fever.
The white ball inside the bottle is called globuli, the purified sugar ball or sugar of milk ball, which was used to saturate with the Aconitum Napellus to dilute the toxicity of medicine and rub into ball. Then, to keep the quality and active principles of the medicine, these globules would be imbibed with alcoholic attenuations and will have been dried out and put in a stopped bottle. It is crucial to keep these globules desiccated or they would fall into powder and lose the medical virtue. All the globules imbibed have a dry and smooth hue, whilst in their natural state they are white and brilliant. |