These mental symptoms will often occur in people who suffer from gastritis, stomach ulcers, etc.; those patients will not express their worries, they will keep everything inside, losing themselves in their work instead. They go into states of anxiety which seems to arise from inside the body, especially the stomach and the abdomen. The patient’s anxiety will often be about his health, and his future; and these anxiety states are relieved in darkness and isolation.
A strange mental symptom is the temporary irrationality of Euphorbium. The rubric I refer to is ‘Insanity, insists on saying his prayers at the tail of his horse’, and it is derived from Pereira: an old Euphorbium worker (one occupied with the production of the gum resin from the milky juice of the plant) ‘…insisted on saying his prayers at the tail of the mill horse during the paroxysm’. Hering adds: ‘He knows his freaks and wants to be by himself and in silence’. Even if they suffer from delusions, Euphorbium patients usually remain rather quiet, reserved, introverted, and controlled.
This is also reflected on the physical level. For there is not only the acute ‘hot state’ of Euphorbium, with high fever, hot skin, burning redness and swelling where the pathological process goes to the surface with great power; there is also a state of chronic lack of vital heat, where all vital powers recede from the periphery to the centre. This state manifests in the form of permanent chill, easy paraesthesia (‘going to sleep’) of the extremities, especially the legs, even beyond the knees, a feeling as if one had not slept enough, with great sleepiness and sensation of stupefaction in the daytime, in syncope, etc. A characteristic proving symptom is: ‘Sensation as if he was lacking in warmth and had not slept the whole night, a feeling as from a debauch; wherewith all the veins of his hand had disappeared from the surface’.
The most striking modality of Euphorbium is an aggravation by rest, with amelioration by motion. It mostly refers to the