Weakness: This medicine, like Alumina, seems to produce a peculiar kind of Paralytic weakness of the muscles in all parts of the body, a sort of lack of tone.
The extremities are weak. This weakness is felt especially in the rectum and bladder. The stool becomes impacted from want of ability of the rectum and colon to expel their contents.
The bladder is also slowed down in its action, and it is with great difficulty that the urine is voided. After urinating, the bladder often remains half full. The urine is very slow to start, and when the patient stands to urinate the urine falls down perpendicularly, as in Hepar. From this we see the sluggish action. The paralytic condition extends also to the veins producing a vaso-motor paralysis.
Induration: Another peculiar condition running through the remedy is the tendency to induration wherever there is an inflamed surface.
All remedies that have this in their nature relate more or less to cancerous affections, because in cancer we have as the most natural feature a tendency to induration.
Ulcers are common in Alumen, and this induration underlies the ulcer; ulcers with indurated base. Or little scales may appear upon the skin where the circulation is feeble, over cartilaginous portions for instance and a great thick indurated mass forms.
Infiltration takes place under this crust, the crust keeps coming off, and a lack of healing follows because of the weakness of the tissues from a vaso-motor paralysis.
Epithelioma is scarcely more than that, and so we have in this remedy features like epithelioma and other cancerous affections. What is the scirrhus but a peculiar form of induration?
When the economy takes on a low type of life, a low form of tissue making, and the tissues inflame and upon the slightest provocation indurate we can see that this is a kind of constitution that is predisposed to deep-seated troubles, to phthisis, Bright’s disease, diabetes, cancer, etc.
We are on the border line of ultimates and something Is going to happen. This remedy leads the economy into such a state of disorder, a low type of tissue making is found, and many of these indurations will have cancer as an ultimate. This is a long acting antipsoric remedy.
Glands: There is also in this medicine a tendency to induration of the neck of the uterus and the mammary glands.
Glands become slowly inflamed, and do not stop with ordinary congestion and hardness, but become as hard as bullets.
This induration extends to the various glands of the body, but is especially noticeable in the tonsils.
For those who have a tendency to colds which settle in the throat, especially singling out the tonsils and indurating these; those who keep on taking cold and the tonsils keep on growing, and indurating, we have in Alumen a medicine that fits the whole process, the hardening and infiltration, and it cures these cases according to the law of similars, when the symptoms agree.
It cures young children growing up with enormously enlarged and very hard tonsils in whom every cold settles in the throat.
Alumen is one of Baryta carb., which has the same tendency. In one patient there will be one kind of constitution, and, after thoroughly examining it, looks like Baryta carb.
You may have a different constitution in another patient, and, after carefully examining it, see that it looks like Alumen; another you will see is Sulphur; another, if you look into it carefully, you find is Calcarea carb., and another, Calcarea iod., and so on among those remedies capable of bringing about the conditions described.
If we can find symptoms which picture the constitutional state we have no trouble. When the symptoms have been well gathered the case is as good as cured; it is easy then to find a remedy.
Partially proved: This remedy is imperfect from the fact that it is only partially proved. I do not care to dwell upon partially proved remedies, but when they have a number of striking features that fit into everyday life it is important to know them. The mental symptoms of this remedy are very few.
The remedy should be proved in the higher potencies upon sensitive persons in order that the mental state may be brought out.
Head: Some of the symptoms of the head are very striking and valuable. Pain on the top of the head with burning. The pain is a sensation as if a weight were pressing down into the skull. You will see a woman in bed with her hand on top of the head and she will say:
“Doctor, it burns right there like fire, and it presses as if my skull would be crushed in, and the only relief I get from pressing hard upon it an from an ice cold cloth pressed upon it.”
In 1881, Kent accepted a position as professor of anatomy at the Homeopathic College of Missouri, an institution with which he remained affiliated until 1888. In 1890, Kent moved to Pennsylvania to take a position as Dean of Professors at the Post-Graduate Homeopathic Medical School of Philadelphia. In 1897 Kent published his magnum opus, Repertory of the Homœopathic Materia Medica. Kent moved to Chicago in 1903, where he taught at Hahnemann Medical College.