: The mental stateof this patient is
that of excitement, anxiety, impulses, melancholy; he wants to do something, wants to hurry;
he has impulses to kill. In this it is very closely related to Arsenicum and
Hepar.
The Arsenicumand Heparpatients also have impulses to commit murder without being offended and
without cause. The sensitiveness to heat will at once decide, for while Iodine is warm-blooded the Arsenicumand Heparpatients are always chilly.
The impulse to do violence is sudden. There are remedies that have
peculiar impulses, impulses without any cause. These impulses are seen in cases of impulsive
insanity; an insanity in which there is an impulse to do violence and strange things, and
when the patient is asked why he does these things he says he does not know.
The patient may not be known to be insane in anything else; he may be a
good business man. Remedies also have this. These things are forerunners. It is recorded
under Heparthat a
barber had an impulse w cut the throat of his patron with the razor while shaving him.
The Nux vomica patient has an impulse to throw her child into the
fire, or to kill her husband whom she dearly loves. The thought comes into her mind and
increases until she becomes actually insane and beyond control and the impulse is carried
into action.
A Natrum sulph. patient will say,
"Doctor, you do not know how I have to resist killing myself.
An impulse to do it comes into my mind."
Iodine has the impulse
to kill, not from anger, not from any sense of justice, but without any cause. An
overwhelming anger is often a cause for violence but the impulses are not of that sort in Iodine.
While reading; or thinking placidly at times a patient may have an
impulse to do himself violence, and this finally grows until the end is a form of impulsive
insanity.
The Iodine patient becomes weak in mind as well as in body; he
is forgetful, cannot remember the little things, they pass out of the mind. He forgets what
he was about to say or do; goes off and leaves packages he has purchased.
The forgetfulness is extensive. But with all these states, do not forget
one thing, that the patient is compelled to keep doing something in order to drive away his
impulses and anxiety.
The anxiety is wearing and distressing unless be keeps busy. Though
mentally prostrated, he is compelled to keep busy and to continue the work, which increases
the prostration of mind. You tell a man who is threatened with softening of the brain, from
overwork, from anxiety and labor in literary work,
"You must stop working, you must rest."
"Why," he will say,
"If I do I would die or go mad."
Such a state comes under Iodine and Arsenicum, but there is one grand distinction by which the two remedies are
seen to part company at once.
The Iodine patient is warm-blooded, wants a cool place to move
in, and to think in, and to work in, whereas the Arsenicumpatient wants heat, wants a warm room, wants to be
warmly clothed, and suffers from the cold.
Iodine suffers from
the heat. So that while the restlessness and anxiety, which are both of body and mind in
each remedy, loom up before the mind as one, if the patient is a hot-blooded patient we
would never think of Arsenicum; if a cold-blooded and shivering patient we would
never think of Iodine.
Among the generals we first mentioned was the tendency to enlarged
glands. Iodine has often cured a group of symptoms coming in the constitution
that I have named, viz.; enlargement of the heart, enlargement of the thyroid and protruding
eyeballs.
Now, if you have one of these patients (suppose it has been sent to you
by somebody who knows no better than to call it exophthalmic goitre), those things that are
so essential to the name of the disease, as they call it, would not be an indication for the
remedy, but the indications would be found among those circumstances that I have given you
that are outside of the projection of the eyes, the enlargement of the thyroid, the
hypertrophy of the heart and the cardiac disturbances.
If the patient is emaciated, is sallow, suffers from heat, has enlarged
glands, and the other symptoms of this medicine, you may expect after its administration an
ultimate cessation of the group of symptoms that are selected to name the disease by. Brain
troubles, acute and chronic, sometimes call for Iodine.
