A five-year-old girl with very itchy eczema
in the cubital region was brought to me by her mother. She is a very pretty, nicely
chubby girl with blond hair and brown eyes. She sits on her mother’s lap, constantly smiling and giggling. Her
mother admonishes her to behave because she is shy and embarrassed during the
examination, which is not usual for her. Typical for her, however, is this
cheerful, lively, chuckling behavior; she is either laughing or crying, nothing
in between.

She is very affectionate and likes hugging, and she likes to show off to
attract attention. When her mother criticizes her, tears appear. She is afraid
of ghosts and storms. When she was younger, she was afraid of ladybugs, now she
is afraid of flies and wasps. She likes the water, but after swimming her
eczema is worse.

She wants her mother to read her fairy tales in the evening. Once, she dreamed
of a dragon. Her favourite activities are dancing, singing, reciting, drawing,
playing with dolls and toy cars and playing hide-and-seek. She learned to ride
a bike by herself. Her favourite colour is yellow.

She often argues with her brother,
who is three and a half years older. If he refuses to give her something,
however, she does not have tantrums, as
he did when he was younger.

She loves to eat honey (3), chocolate, tomato soup, sweet noodles, Nesquick
balls with pasta, sausages, crackers, chips, apples, but in general can be quite
picky in her eating. She does not like lentils, bean soup, vegetables, cabbage
or meat. She drinks quite a lot.

Her eczema started when she was 18
months old. She was sitting in the hallway when a neighbor began to drill into
the wall. She was so scared of this noise that she started crying very loudly, and
shaking over her whole body. For the next seven days, she had bad constipation
with very hard stools, tough as a stone, which had to be manually removed from
her rectum. Since that time, she feared sitting on the toilet. A month after
this incident, the eczema occurred. Apart from the eczema, she now has conjunctivitis
in her left eye.

Past history: chickenpox, 3 x otitis media,
ruptured eardrum in the right ear, with beige-green pus. She has had fevers
with high temperature twice, about 40° C. She uncovers herself during sleep.

The child is similar to her mother, so I also ask about her. Like her daughter, she is cheerful and enjoys
dancing. She says that her father died when she was fourteen. Four years ago, she
started to have symptoms of allergy in her eyes; she feels dry eyes when moving
them, as if the surface of her eye would be wrinkling and crinkling, but only up
to the pupil. She has swelling of the lower eyelids, and her eyes and the region
around them itch, then she has pain under her eyes. Sometimes, she sneezes. The
condition improves by putting spoons chilled in the freezer on her eyes.

She had smallpox four years ago, at
the same time as her daughter.
She loves spring and summer. When
asked to compare herself with something, she says she could be a plant.
Usually, she is chilly. She likes
meat and has an aversion to sweet dishes.
She is afraid to drive a car in order not to hurt someone. If something would happen,
she feels she would have it in front of her eyes forever. She cares about
others and is anxious for her children. She cannot bear raised voices.
Her brother had eczema until the
age of two, and four middle ear inflammations.

Analysis

I noted the obvious similarity between mother
and daughter. The most characteristic symptoms were the excessive gaiety of the
girl and her enormous desire for honey. I used the following rubrics:

Ailments, fright, from

Generals, food and drinks, honey, desire

Cheerful

Hamamelis, Sabadilla and Veratrum album came up. When repertorizing, I always
take notice of connections between remedies coming up. Of these three remedies,
two belong to the same family: Sabadilla and Veratrum album.

Further clarification is obtained, if we use a rubric of her mother: Cares, full of others, about

The only remaining remedy is now Sabadilla.

This medicine is also in the section “hard stool” and
“constipation”, but they are very large, so I did not use them. The important
part, however, is the genius of the remedy Sabadilla: shrinking, shriveling
sensation (For example: Mind, Delusions, diminished, shrunken, parts are). It is
a feeling that her mother felt in the eye: shriveled surface of the eye.  

Botanical names of Sabadilla remedy
are Schoenocaulon officinale, Melanthium sabadilla, Veratrum officinale. This
plant belongs in APG3 classification to the family Melanthiaceae (as well as Veratrum
album), order Liliales. According to the latest findings of Jan Scholten,
Melanthiaceae family belongs to a subphase 5 of a phase 6 (Liliales) of class
Monocots. Subphase or phase 5 brings the nitrogen quality of enjoyment of life,
vitality, vibrancy, vigour and enthusiasm. It is perhaps the reason why both
mother and daughter had such a desire for laughing, singing, and dancing. I believe
that nothing is completely random. Shrinking can mean the opposite of the expansion
that nitrogen desires.

In the case of  the Sabadilla girl, the
remedy corresponds to the Monocot class, which has a strong theme of silicium and
carbon. The mother of our patient lost her father at fourteen, a period which
corresponds to the silicium series. I do not want to say that we should automatically
take everything into the account, although it is advisable to make as
comprehensive and meaningful a totality of the case as we are able to.

Prescription:  on May 25th 1998, I
prescribed the girl Sabadilla 5CH 3 x 2 globules.

Follow-up

July 28th: her mother told
me that a week after taking the remedy, the eczema got worse, so she stopped
administering the remedy. After three more days, the eruptions and itching
subsided and since that time they have not reappeared. Mother also reported
that her daughter had much less desire for honey. Meanwhile, fifteen years have
passed, and the eczema has not returned.

Photos
Playing with confetti;Lee J Haywood; Flickr
Shriveled; Qhimm; Flickr