Pain in uterus, bearing down, comes from back to abdomen:crosses limbs to prevent protrusion of parts.
Prolapsus of uterus, of vagina, with constipation.
Pressure in uterus, causing oppression of breathing; the pressure downwards is as if everything would fall out, with pain in abdomen.
She must cross her limbs in order to prevent the protrusion of the vagina, yet nothing protruded, but there was an increase of gelatinous leucorrhoea. Yellowish leucorrhoeal discharge.
Leucorrhoea like milk, only by day, with burning and excoriation between thighs.
Before menses acrid leucorrhoea, with soreness of the pudendum.
Metrorrhagia, during climacteric or pregnancy, especially fifth and seventh months.
Menses: too late: too early: causing faintness, chilliness, shuddering.
Amenorrhoea: at puberty: from a cold: in feeble women with delicate skin.
Sudden hot flushes at climacteric with momentary sweat, weakness and tendency to faint.
Short, hacking cough, in the evening, on lying down.
Spasmodic cough.
Cannot sleep at night on account of incessant cough.
Short, dry cough, seems to come out of stomach.
Oppression of the chest morning and evening. (One remembers an asthma case, where nothing helped till Sepia was given, on his general symptoms.)
Hering gives, ‘Tuberculous and other chronic diseased conditions of the central third of right lung.-Arsenicum the upper third.”
Pain in back across hips.
When stooping sudden pain in back as if struck by a hammer: (>) by pressing back against something hard.
Pain in small of back: pain and weakness: weakness when walking: pain as if sprained. Pain with stiffness, better by walking.
A short walk fatigue much.
Sudden prostration and stinging faintness.
Great faintness with heat, then coldness.
Faintness while kneeling in church: at trifles.
Great exhaustion in a.m. during menses.
Hands generally cold, but moist with perspiration.
Very cold feet with headache (feeling as if they stood in cold water up to the ankles).
Attacks of flushes of heat, as if hot water were poured over one with redness of face, sweat of whole body and anxiety, without thirst.
Profuse night sweats. Cold night sweats, chest, back and thighs.
Perspiration of head at night in sleep. (Calcarea, Mercurius, Sil)
Sensation of icy-cold hand between the scapulae.
Herpetic eruption on lips; about mouth. (Nat. mur., Rhus., etc.)
Itching often changes to burning when scratching.
Itching on the bends of elbows.
Soreness of skin: humid places on bends of knees.
Brown or claret-coloured tetter-like spots: cloasma. Herpes circinatus.
Brown spots on skin with leucorrhoea.
Tettery eruptions: humid: with itching and burning.
Queer sensations:
As if heart stood still.
As if suspended in air: brain crushed: head would burst.
As if eyes were gone and a cool wind blew out of sockets.
As if lids too heavy to open. As if lids paralysed.
Eyes as if balls of fire: lids too tight to cover eyeballs.
As if everything in abdomen were turning around: as if viscera were turning inside out.
As if ribs broken and sharp points sticking into flesh.
As if a strap, wide as her hand were drawn tightly round waist.
Liver as if bursting: as of something adherent in abdomen.
As if everything would issue through vulva.
As if something alive in abdomen. (Crocus, Thuja.)
A weight in anus, Bladder full, as if contents would fall out.
As if urinary organs would be pressed out.
As if everything would fall out of uterus: uterus as if clutched.
As if vulva were enlarged: something heavy would force itself from vagina.
Chest as if hollow: sore.
As if stomach being scraped.
As if knife thrust into top of left lung.
Back struck by hammer, as if going to break in back. Shoulder dislocated, feet, asleep.
A mouse running in lower limbs.
As if bones of legs were decaying.
Icy hand between scapulae. (Burning, Lycopodium, Phosphorus)
As if she would suffocate.
Something twisting in stomach and rising to throat.
Feet in cold water up to ankles. (Compare Calcarea)
Pains, ailments, disease, in any part of the body, and of every description-in a Sepia patient.
Ptosis suggests Sepia.
Intertrigo suggests Sepia.
“Bearing down” suggests Sepia.
Sepia is an important remedy in insanity, and in “borderline cases”. We will reproduce a couple of little cases, quoted elsewhere, but especially pertinent here:-
“Lady is going to foal. Last year she bit and kicked her first foal, and would not left it suck, and it died. What can we give her?” Oh! indifference to offspring? Sepia, of course 1 Give her a dose of Sepia.” And the foal arrived in due course, and Lady was the most devoted mother of all the mares that year; couldn’t bear the foal a moment out of her sight; grazed round it where it lay in the grass.
“Doctor, can you help a young man? It is his first baby, and he hates it. He cannot bear his wife to touch it. Her people had him shut up, but his people got him out again. I stayed with her all last night, and he was raving in the next room, banging about and smashing things. They are afraid he will kill the baby.” “Oh! indifference to offspring” he got a dose of Sepia. In a week he came up himself, weepy, shaky, frightfully upset still, but better. The next report was, “Doctor, you know that young man who hated his baby? Well, he is devoted to it now,. He can hardly bear anyone to touch it when he is there. He is quite cured.”
You see, Sepia is the drug that has caused and cured indifference to offspring. Mental symptoms, where they exist, are the most important in determining the required remedy.
Here is another striking and well-remembered Sepia mental case. A handsome young woman, statuesque not only in features and in colour-stony white-but in immobility, was brought to “Out-patients” some years ago. It was impossible to get an answer out of her, except after a long wait, and then it was monosyllabic. The shock of her brother’s going abroad was said to be the cause that had unhinged her. Her expression never changed: one could get no response: she just sat there immovable, while her mother gave what symptoms she could and then took her away. Arsenicum suggested itself, and Sepia: -one can see now, and at this distance of time, that Arsenicum might have been distrusted in a patient so devoid of restlessness-so entirely atypical. (And yet, recently, one has seen Arsenicum work the miracle in a girl with acute heart disease, with endocarditis and great effusion, who was absolutely a typical as regards anxious restlessness:-though her symptoms, otherwise, were Arsenicum)
Well, on further consideration (Arsenicum having failed to touch the handsome statue) Sepia was given, and a few weeks later a veritable tornado of a girl in on out-patient work, all expression and animation; all eagerness to tell her story what she had done and felt; all the ways in which she had failed to commit suicide. She had tried to drag her mother in front of an omnibus: she had tried to hang herself from a skylight, only someone came in: she had even gone to the lavatory and tried to drown herself by pulling the plug. All this and more she poured out with intense and indescribable animation. That dose of Sepia had unfrozen her, and redeemed her life. For several years after that she used to present herself, and she remained normal and commonplace, and never relapsed even under circumstances, a little later, of trial and distress. Homoeopathy may be beneath contempt-“nonsense”-“sugar pills”-“imagination”-but it works, provided that you hit the remedy (as here, where the one drug did nothing, the other cured). Other wise it is all the things they say against it-but that is when it did not happen to be Homoeopathy at all. Get it out of your head that a drug is homoeopathic, and the Homoeopathy must stand or fall by it because it come out of a homoeopathic case, or has been prepared after the manner of Hahnemann by a homoeopathic chemist, or has been potentized, or prescribed by a homoeopathic doctor (or even by a lay homoeopath!) or because it has been “worked out” and has, more or less,” come through”. Whereas, on the other hand, a remedy may be absolutely homeopathic when it comes from an ordinary chemist’s shop, is prescribed by an old school doctor, and is supposed to be an ordinary “allopathic” drug:-As for instance, Ipecac. for incessant nausea and vomiting-which it causes: Pat. iod, for gummata (which it has produced, and cures): Salicylic acid for Meniere’s disease, whose symptoms it evokes, and so on, a large number of drugs: I think it was Dr. Dyce Brown who discovered enough of these to fill a pamphlet. So when we have failed (as with Arsenicum in the above case), it was not because Homoeopathy was incapable of curing, but because we were incapable of finding the homoeopathic remedy. This applies to our failures everywhere; in some cases of rheumatoid arthritis, for example, where the remedy is sometimes terribly difficult to spot, but when found can do astonishing work in relieving what is incurable in advanced cases, and in curing early cases.
Which reminds one!-that Sepia is one of the remedies that has cured rheumatoid arthritis-in Sepia patients. It has helped within our knowledge several times. Here is a case. But remember that Homoeopathy does not treat diseases, but patients with diseases: and don’t on any account write down in your memory that Sepia is “a cure” for that disease. That is the perfect way of demonstrating-to the satisfaction of your inexperience-that “Homoeopathy is no use for rheumatoid arthritis any way!”- you have “proved that it is not!”-with remedies that did not happen to be en rapport with the patient.
