Mancinella

The following text is a short translation from Prof Vithoulkas’ greek lectures on Materia Medica.

This is the first remedy to think of when the patient feels that she has gone mad. Just by seeing her, you think she’s on the verge of insanity. There is a wild look in her eyes.

Other remedies with fear of losing one’s sanity are Puls, Calc, and Cann-i, but Mancinella does go mad, gets into a mental disorder, and enters this condition quite easily. She fears that “I’m going mad, I’m going mad”, feels as if possessed by the devil, and these thoughts come again and again. Feels that she is possessed by an evil spirit. Has obsessive ideas, even starts to have visual delusions, thinks someone has entered into the house.… Tremendous fear that she’s going crazy, because she checks the house, and doesn’t find anyone. Oscillates between sanity and insanity.

Within this wild mental disorder – and they are really deeply disordered, they feel the only thing they have left is to pray, that they can counter the attack of the evil spirit by praying.

It is very difficult to describe these conditions. “The devil has possessed me”, they say. an evilness. You are frightened when you see this mental disorder; you feel uneasy; that’s the affect they have.

It’s as if the organism itself allows the penetration of such negative thoughts and conditions. She cannot drive away these thoughts, these mental pictures. These patients are disturbed people, like Satanists for example.

In the meantime, before they enter this psychotic state, their instincts become distorted, they enter sexually disordered states.

Like Rhus-t and Conium, they are superstitious; for example, they say, “If I look right in the street, something bad will happen to me.” They also have a feeling, which you will mistake for Lachesis, of constriction at the neck, and that they cannot swallow or talk.

A symptom I’ve seen many times is that on the soles of their feet, they get some kind of dermatological symptoms, that is blisters that break, ooze a liquid, and then dry up and leave cracks in the skin.

In general, they do not like constriction or tightness, like Lachesis.

Those are the basic symptoms.

You can also read Boericke's Materia Medica of Mancinella.