Generalities: If we were practicing in the old-fashioned way and considered the wonderfully volatile nature of Ammonium carb. in some of its forms we would only look upon it as an agent to relieve fainting and simple affections and use it in the form of hartshorn to comfort old maids and some other women.
But Ammonium carb. is a deep-acting, constitutional medicine, an anti-psoric. It effects rapid blood changes, it disturbs the whole economy and it establishes a scorbutic constitution. Its fluids are all acrid.
The saliva becomes acrid and excoriates the lips, so that they crack in the corners and middle, and become raw and dry and scabby.
The eye-lids fester and become dry and cracked from the excoriating fluids from the eye.
The stool is acrid and excoriates.
The genitals of the female become raw and sore from the acrid menstrual discharge and leucorrhoea, and wherever there is an ulcer upon the skin the fluids that ooze from it excoriate the parts round about, this excoriating character belonging to all of the exuding fluids and discharges.
This remedy has bleeding of black blood, often fluid blood, that will not coagulate, flowing from the nose, the uterus, the bladder and bowels.
The blood is dark, showing that a great disturbance is taking place in the circulation.
The skin has a mottled appearance intermingled with great pallor.
It produces a violent action upon the heart, in which there is audible palpitation, and every motion aggravates the pulsation. With this is associated great prostration.
It is rather a strange coincidence that the ancients know that Ammonium carb. would overcome difficult breathing from cardiac attacks and that aqua ammonia or hartshorn is used today to a certain extent in indications similar to those mentioned.
They use it as a stimulant, but when indicated the single dose very high is enough.
The ancients knew enough, also, to use hartshorn in the low forms of pneumonia, at the turning point in the advanced stage; that is an old allopathic practice, but it had a homoeopathic relation to some of the cases.
Once in a while they would cure a patient in the awful stage of prostration with heart failure at the end of pneumonia, and because they relieved such a one it was then established as a remedy for all future use.
Ammonium carb. has a state analogous to blood poisoning, such as we find in erysipelas and in the most malignant forms of scarlet fever, with prostration, great dyspnoea, so that it seems as if the heart were giving out.
With this there is an unusual patchy condition of the surface, due to the paralytic condition of the blood vessels, enlargement of the glands, duskiness and puffiness of the face.
Ammonium carb. has been used allopathically in just such a state for centuries and it has demonstrated its homeopathic relations by its efficacy.
Heart: It belongs to the simple enfeeblement, weak heart, emaciation. There is quite an absence of symptoms and a lack of response to remedies.
The patient must lie in bed because of the palpitation and difficult breathing on motion. It is a matter of mere weakness. Such a case furnished me much amusement for a year and a half.
There was a woman in this city who answered just such a description; her state was one of peculiar cardiac weakness with dyspnoea and palpitation on motion; I had been treating the case, but had not fully studied it, and as she did not progress under my management she was taken out of my hands and taken to one of our most able neurologists, who put her upon the “rest cure” and promised that in six weeks she would be perfectly well.
But at the end of six weeks she was worse than ever and a cardiac specialist was then brought to examine her.
He said it was true the heart was not vigorous, but there was no organic affection and consequently the case did not belong to his branch.
Then a lung specialist was brought in, and later she was examined by all kinds of specialists. All of her organs were fully investigated, and it was announced that nothing was the matter with them; but the poor woman could not walk because of her sufferings and palpitating heart.
She had a little dry, backing cough that did not amount to anything, but her chest was examined and there was nothing wrong with it.
But after she bad been in this continual fire for about three months, and was steadily failing, the side of the family that were my adherents prevailed against the others and I went to see her again.
I continued to study the case, which was extremely vague, having nothing but those few symptoms, and finally I settled upon Ammonium carb., and she has been on this remedy for eighteen months.
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.