Benzinum
Benzene (petroleum benzine / ligroin in older usage) · Human-made/chemical
The Benzinum patient is profoundly disturbed in mind and body, with irritability, weeping at trifles, and terrifying hallucinations at night. There is a typhoid-like exhaustion with wasting, pallor, and general prostration. Characteristic sensations include feeling of falling through the bed and floor, with a directional tendency for pains to travel upward from below.
Key symptoms
- Severe darting pains in occiput from below upward worse motion
- Hallucination: great white hand appearing in darkness causing terror
- Sensation of falling through bed and floor
- Insomnia with photopsic illusions and wide-open eyes
- Dysentery-like stools smelling of benzine with tenesmus and rectal throbbing
- Extreme thirst for ice-water satisfied with a sip but wanting it again immediately
- Weeping at trifles; extremely irritable and fault-finding
- Pains travel from below upward throughout the body
Worse (aggravation)
- Motion (headache)
- Rising after sitting (headache)
- Night
- Right side
Benzol, Benzoline, Benzene. A product of distillation from coal tar. C6 H6. Tincture with alcohol.
Clinical
Dysentery. Fever. Headache. Insomnia. Sweat. Typhoid fever. Vision, disorders of.
Characteristics
Our knowledge of this medicine is derived from observations on a worker in a rubber factory, who for weeks had his hands and arms daily bathed in benzine, and drank water impregnated with it. It caused profound disturbance of mind and body; weeping at trifles; irritability; pain darting upwards in occiput. Could not turn eyes upward without severe aching and throbbing. A sort of clairvoyant state, in which a great white hand appeared to him in the darkness, coming outspread towards his face, causing him in terror to scream for the watcher. A sense of falling through the bed and floor. Insomnia and photopsic illusions. Pains travel from below upward (headache, pain in anus); also chills.
Phatak's chapter on Benzinum is available in the app.
Read Phatak in the appClassical texts are in the public domain. Educational reference only — not medical advice.
