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.”
She wants the cloth changed and made cold every few minutes. It is a queer thing that a pressing pain is made better from pressing upon the part. This is like Cactus, pressing pain on vertex relieved from pressure.
The rubric of remedies with that symptom is very small, and hence this remedy fills a place.
There are some strange, rare and peculiar symptoms for which paucity of remedies, and we have to work in other channels and along sidetracks in getting the constitutional state of the patient.
Alumen cured the pressing pain on the vertex in one patient in whom it alternated with the most troublesome chronic, irritable bladder.
” Vertigo: lying on his back, with weakness in pit of stomach; > opening eyes; > turning on right side.”
Heart: There is another feature, however, in this remedy, the palpitation is brought on from lying on the right side.
It would strike anyone as something very singular, because palpitation is generally worse lying on the left side.
A heart that is fluttering, enlarged or disordered is generally worse while lying on the left, as the heart has less room then, but it is strange, rare and unique when these symptoms are worse lying on the right side.
When this condition is present in a patient it is necessary to find a remedy having just exactly that symptom, and very often it will be seen that the rest of the symptoms of the case fit into the remedy that has produced this peculiar state.
There is one more feature that you must add to these things, viz.: slowness and sluggishness of the muscles throughout the body, a slowing down of all the muscles, a sense of weakness in the arms and legs.
Stools and rectum: In the constipation there may be some urging to stool without result or he may go several days without desire. There is no ability to expel the stool. He will strain a long time with no success, and finally after many days the stool is passed and is an agglomeration of hard balls, large masses of little bard balls like marbles all fastened together.
This is a very strong feature in an Alumen constitution.
“Stool: less frequent, dryer and harder; large black, hard or in small pieces like sheep’s dung; no relief afterwards.”
After stool there is a sensation as if the rectum were yet full. This peculiar feature comes with the weakness or paresis of the rectum, i. e., the rectum is not strong enough to expel all of its contents, and hence the sensation of unfinished stool.
In the rectum there is ulceration with bleeding from the ulcers. The hemorrhoids ulcerate and they are very painful, so that after every stool he has prolonged suffering, a dull aching pain in the rectum.
Catarrhal conditions prevail throughout the remedy.
In old scrofulous, psoric patients, who are subject to chronic yellow bland discharges from the eyes, with enlarged veins; chronic yellow discharges from the vagina and from the urethra in the male; chronic painless gonorrhoea.
In addition to the catarrhal discharges there is a tendency to ulceration, so that there are little ulcerative patches in the vagina, little aphthous patches in the vagina and on the cervix of the uterus.
When a patient is suffering from a chronic gonorrhoea, instead of the discharge becoming white as in a gleet if remains yellow, and there are little indurations along the urethra, which the patient will call the physician’s attention to as “lumps”.
Discharge with “little bunches” along the urethra. These are little ulcers, and beneath the ulcers are indurations.
When this state is present you have an Alumen gonorrhoea. In a little while the patient will have two or three strictures unless he gets this remedy, because these little ulcers will each end in stricture narrowing the canal. Another strange feature in the catarrhal states and in the ulcers is its tendency to affect the vessels.
The veins become varicose and bleed, so that there may be bleeding from any of the inflamed or catarrhal areas and bleeding from the ulcers.
There are many neuralgic pains about the head of a non descript character. These head pains come on in the morning on awaking.
Eyes: The eye symptoms are of an inflammatory or congestive character, with tendency to ulceration. Purulent ophthalmia; chronic sore eyes.
“Sees things double by candle light.”
“Nasal polypus left side. Lupus or cancer on the nose. Face pale as a corpse, lips blue. Scirrhus of the tongue.”
Mouth: See what a tendency it has to produce minute growths, little indurations and infiltrations. Bleeding from the teeth; the teeth decay and the gums recede from the teeth; the teeth become loose; scorbutic appearance of the gums.
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.