Old School studies and experiments with and teaches drugs for their physiological action, and lays down the maximum nonlethal doses for adults and for children. Homoeopathy studies and employs, often, the same drugs, but for their exactly opposite effect, and in the fine dosage of vital stimulation. Old School knowledge of drugs is therefore only half-knowledge, i.e. of their crude toxic and subversive action : and it is only in a few instances that it recognizes and employs them for their homoeopathic action. Ipecacuanha is interesting as being one of the drugs that Allopathy uses to cure homoeopathically : uses both ways, in fact, to provoke and to cure vomiting. It is especially in the vomiting of pregnancy that, forsaking the emetic dose of " grs. XV to XXX ", it is given in one-minim doses of Ipecacuanha wine. It works for us in the high and highest potencies. Ipecac. 200 is a mighty prescription. But, in sensitives, as we shall demonstrate later, Ipecac. can cause, and therefore cure, the most terrible attacks of asthma and suffocation, and it is anything but a universally safe emetic. Its poisonings and provings are interesting, graphic, and instructive. It will be seen that Asthma bulks largely in the poisonings and provings of Ipecacuanha, vide the following condensed quotations from the Cyclopedia of Drug Pathogenesy. Clinical confirmation in the use of the drug has laid special stress on its nauseating properties — provocative and curative : — and the " Nausea not relieved by vomiting ", and the " nausea, constant, with a clean tongue " have come to be the main suggestive symptoms for its exhibition. And yet — in its chest troubles, with agonies of dyspnoea and suffocation, there may be little or no nausea. Or, again, there may be nausea, with violent efforts to vomit and to cough at the same time producing indescribable terrors of suffocation ; seeming to threaten life. Hale White tells us that the drug affects not only the stomach, but the vomiting centre in the medulla, which may account for the clean tongue ? — in characteristic cases. Recently we have seen a most interesting case : — asthma of years standing, combined with a skin disease ; the two, apparently, not alternating, but co-existing. A few doses of Ipecac. in highest potency, started almost immediate improvement in the skin condition — which one had not expected : but also greatly improved the asthma, which is " better than for years ". The prescription was consequent on this attempt to produce a Drug-Picture of Ipecac. By the way, a clever old homoeopathic chemist used to say, " The young doctors make good prescriptions, because they are reading up Materia Medica." But — we should all do that — incessantly : and certainly writing up drugs, and teaching drugs, does, or ought to, teach oneself. Who uses Ipecacuanha for " skins "? Our books say, indeed, that it may be useful to bring out suppressed eruptions. As in scarlet fever, etc., " eruptions suppressed, or tardily appearing, with oppression of the chest ; vomiting and tickling cough ". In erysipelas, " where the redness disappears, with vomiting ". And it has " Itching of the skin, with nausea ; has to scratch till he vomits " And Hale White says, that Ipecac. applied to the skin is a powerful irritant, produces redness, vesication and pustulation. Now first, we will condense a few cases from Cyclopedia of Drug Pathogenesy, which show the effects of crude Ipecacuanha on sensitives, and thus point to the help it may give in the potencies to patients rendered thus sensitive by disease. 1/ Poisonings : from pulverizing Ipecac. root. Inhaled a quantity of the dust, which caused him to vomit three times and gave him oppression of the chest. He left off pounding it, but one hour later had the most violent attack of suffocation, constriction of windpipe and throat, earthy cadaverous complexion, the most frightful anxiety during the suffocative attack. These symptoms increased every minute . . . after five hours he thought he would be suffocated. Respiratory symptoms lasted for several days, though in a more moderate degree.