Hemophilia and Vicarious Menstruation.

Related entries: hemorrhages: ElTh-links

The patient was a woman of eighteen years, emaciated, with waxy skin and a small pink spot on both cheeks. From childhood she had been a bleeder. At fifteen years of age she was attacked with an alarming hemorrhage from the nose, which recurred monthly. Menstruation was slight, and often entirely absent. The bleeding came on suddenly. The amount of hemorrhage was so great as to be unbelievable. The family always called a physician, but by the time he arrived the patient was in a state of syncope, with the bleeding stopped.

I saw her at one time, when she was eighteen years of age, in one of her spells, (thanks to a fast horse) and immediately plugged the nares with absorbent cotton saturated in peroxide of hydrogen. Reasoning that the same atonic condition of the blood vessels that permits exudation in dropsy would be present in hemophilia, I gave her five drops of specific apocynum and repeated the dose in ten minutes. By that time the bleeding had stopped and for the first time the patient did not faint. I kept her on two drops of specific apocynum four times a day for a year and had her keep a bottle of peroxide of hydrogen handy. She has had two or three slight nose-bleeds which were controlled by plugging as directed. She has never had a day's sickness since and has grown lazy, fat and saucy, with normal menstruation.

The patient had no other medicine but apocynum from me and no other doctor was consulted during that year.

I. V. COLE, M. D.

Ellingwood's Therapeutist, Vol. 2, 1908, was edited by Finley Ellingwood M.D.