Murex


One dose of Murex, fourth, was taken in six spoonfuls of water. Twelve hours after taking the medicine, acute pain in the right side of the uterus, which crossed the entire body and extended upward to the left breast….


This substance was first introduce into the Materia Medica by Dr. Petroz, of Paris, is some observations published in the Revue Critique et Retrospective de la Matiere Medicale, vol. iii., 1841.

Dr. Petroz does not state from what variety of the mollusk which furnishes the purple coloring matter the specimen employed by him in the proving was obtained. A coloring substance, to all appearance identical, is found in various genera of the family Muricidae as well as in the genus purpura of the family Buccinidae.

Weber, of Paris, in his Codex, des Medicaments Homoeopathiques ou pharmacopee pratique et raisonne, has the following remarks:

“MUREX PURPUREA. Coquille a pourpre. It belongs to the class of mollusks and to the family of Purpurifera. There are several varieties which may have the same value in Homoeopathy, inasmuch as up to the present day the only part used for experimentation has been the coloring matter which furnishes the purple, and even this experimentation has been made not upon the healthy subject, but upon the sick.

“The ancients derived their purple dye from several different mollusks, from the Biccinum, a variety found upon the rocks, as well as from the Purpurea, which is the “Coquille a pourpre,” properly so-called, and which is found not only upon the Phoenician coast, but also through out the Mediterranean. Recently a juice, analogous to the purple dye, has been found in several conchiferae belonging to the family of the Limacidae. This juice, which is viscous, and, when first obtained, colorless, is found in a distinct little sac which in the majority of these mollusks is situated between the heart and the liver. When brought into contact with the atmosphere this juice becomes successively yellow, green, blue and finally a reddish purple.

“It is insoluble in water, alcohol or ether; consequently, for homoeopathic use, the first three attenuations should be prepared by trituration.”

Jahr and Catellan, in their Pharmacopoeia, Paris, 1853, say: “MUREX PURPUREA, purpura patula, cochlea veram purpuram fundens; pourpre antique; Purpurschnecke. An oval shell furrowed transversely, studded with tubercles, especially when young; with a somewhat short helix, the aperture bell-mouthed. Color, a blackish russet externally. The columella of a russet yellow. The straight margin white. This variety of shell inhabits the Mediterranean, where it is pretty common. Its juice, which is the true purple dye, is contained in a large fold in the form of a pocket upon the back near the neck. It requires a good deal of adroitness to collect this juice, for it is quickly thrown out by the animal. The juice, after being taken from the animal, is at first blue, and then of a beautiful green, finally of a magnificent purplish red. Cloth dyed with it always preserves its color.”

The provings recorded by Dr. Petroz, and which are the only ones that we possess, are, it must be confessed, fragmentary. So are the contributions of every individual prover of every drug. So are the single stones, of which when they are duly placed together, a stately mansion is constructed. If the stones were neglected, because, when regarded separately, they are nothing like a house, how could they ever be brought together and built up, forming the house? If the results of each individual prover’s or experimenter’s labors are to be withheld on the ground that they are fragmentary, how shall matter be accumulated for a complete and exhaustive proving?

It has been further objected that Dr. Petroz’s proving is not a pure one, because his subjects had, two of them a slight leucorrhoea, and the third a cutting uterine pain at the time of the menstrual flow. Some, chief among them Dr. Roth, of Paris, would rigorously exclude from the Materia Medica Pura everything which does not rest upon exact observation of the effect of drugs upon exclusively and strictly healthy persons.

Etymologically, he is quite correct. A pure Materia Medica has no business with a single symptom obtained from observation on the sick, however slightly sick, or sick in a way however foreign to the nature of the symptom in question.

But in good part, the criticism of Dr. Roth is sheer pedantry, not practical sagacity.

An ideal Materia Medica Pura should contain only symptoms obtained upon the absolutely healthy. Ages will elapse before we can have a complete Materia Medica of this kind. It is certainly an object worthy of unceasing labor.

The Materia Medica which we possess while made up in good part of pure symptoms (symptoms observed upon the absolutely healthy), contains also symptoms observed upon those who are not absolutely healthy. The symptoms we possess of certain medicines are wholly of the latter character. Cases occur in practice to which no remedy of which we have pure symptoms corresponds, but which nevertheless finds its simile and it individual specific in one of these drugs of which we have no knowledge except the symptoms it has produced upon the sick.

Now, the pedantry of the critic in his closet may exclude from a pure Materia Medica every proving that is, so to speak, impure, but the question for the practical man is this: Shall any proving, however fragmentary, however impure, which yet puts it in the power of the physician to cure even a single case of disease, be cast out from the Materia Medica? The answer must be, let it remain for the sake of these rare cases as a stimulus to pure and complete provings, as a contribution to the clinical, if not, in pedantic literalness, to the pathogenetic history of the drug!

The point of greatest importance in relation to the fragmentary provings, which are published from time to time, and from a collection of which an exhaustive knowledge of the drug is ultimately to be obtained, seems to us to be this, that the name and condition of the prover should be attached to each symptom, and that thus the student may be enabled to judge for himself of the pureness and authenticity of the symptoms.

The observations of Dr. Petroz are given in the following with but little abbreviation. They are followed by some clinical observations by Dr. Constantine Hering and other practitioners. All together, these remarks should serve to draw attention to Murex purpurea as a substance promising rich returns to the careful prover.

MUREX PURPUREA, by Dr. Petroz, of Paris, from La Revne Critique et Retrospective de la Matiere Medicale:

The entire scope of the action of therapeutic agents is not easily recognized, even by those who have a profound understanding of the Materia Medica based on experimentation on the healthy subject.

This difficulty explains the astonishment of practitioners when they meet with unexpected results, the products of some particular condition different from that which constitutes the physiological state. The observations of these effects in conditions very similar to each other, if collected with care, should, after a time, constitute the second part of the Materia Medica, which we might call the clinical, in contradistinction to the pure or experimental part.

The latter, however, the fundamental basis of the art of curing, should be regarded as an inviolable law, the point of departure of every positive notion, the sacred volume to which we faithfully recur on every occasion on which we may have been led away, by a sort of involuntary impulse as it were, to that empiric method which has, up to the present time, characterized the successively prevailing doctrines.

Experimentation on the healthy subject, while it produces symptoms analogous to the majority of those observed in the sick, has not been able to go so far as to produce those disorders, whether functional or material, serious, and yet so common which appall the most practiced and hardened observer.

That the proving of a medicinal substance upon the healthy subject should make known all the effects which it is capable of developing, it must be repeated not only under different conditions of age, sex, etc., but also under variable conditions of susceptibility. But even if one succeed in finding healthy individuals of very unusual susceptibility, this is but trifling, compared with the susceptibility which characterizes certain pathological conditions.

Furthermore, where is the physician, who, whatever his devotion to science, would assume the right of pushing his proving to the extent of endangering the life of the prover.

This difficulty of pushing experimentation far enough to discover every medicinal property which a substance may possess is relative, as I have said above, to the susceptibility of the prover. Thus a young woman, very impressible and courageous, presented to me, when under the influence of Lycoperdon Bovista, symptoms which were the very image of asphyxia from the fumes charcoal.

In proving a mimosaasperata she experienced several epileptiform nervous symptoms.

But it is a rare thing to find individuals so well adapted to this work. In default of them, we must interrogate the pathological susceptibility, which, in its turn, may prove a fruitful source of positive knowledge.

Carroll Dunham
Dr. Carroll Dunham M.D. (1828-1877)
Dr. Dunham graduated from Columbia University with Honours in 1847. In 1850 he received M.D. degree at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York. While in Dublin, he received a dissecting wound that nearly killed him, but with the aid of homoeopathy he cured himself with Lachesis. He visited various homoeopathic hospitals in Europe and then went to Munster where he stayed with Dr. Boenninghausen and studied the methods of that great master. His works include 'Lectures on Materia Medica' and 'Homoeopathy - Science of Therapeutics'.