Both of these remedies have very decided gastric symptoms. Constant nausea, vomiting and indigestion. Antimonium tart. with its difficult breathing is sick at the stomach. Loathes everything, loathes food; vomits even water.
He has also a docile state and if allowed to be quiet, in spite of all the sufferings, he will fall into a sleep, or go into a state of inability to feel. He will cough and sleep, and snore through the dyspnoea, so that it is in many ways like Antimonium crud., but Antimonium crud. has nothing like the copious flow of mucus from mucous membranes that are inflamed. It has nothing like the passive state of the whole economy, It is not so desperate in its provings, and not so dreadful to look upon.
Eyes: Clinically Ant. tart. has been confined in its use mostly to the mucous membranes of the chest, but it has the same passive conditions of all the mucous membranes of the body. Discharges of white mucous from the eyes.
“Eyes prominent, glaring. Dim, and swimming, Gonorrhoeal ophthalmia.”
But the rheumatic conditions furnish another form of this remedy, another phase of it like Antimonium crudum. The joints are affected, take on a passive, slow infiltration and become dropsical; dropsical swelling of all the joints. Gouty infiltration of the joints, and these are especially bad during the cold, wet weather. Eye symptoms of this gouty character.
Eyes infiltrated along with the joints, so there is a gouty state of the eyes. The gouty state affects the whole body. The mucous membrane is pale instead of being red and inflamed; it is pale and relaxed, and it appears to ooze; mucus forms upon it very readily.
This is the state that occurs in the chest. It is not that burning rawness found in Arsenicum and the more acute remedies, although there is a state of prostration and the anxiety and cold sweat which resembles Arsenicum
Teeth: Then this gouty state affects the teeth. His teeth are all rheumatic.
“Rheumatic pains in the teeth,” with rheumatic pains in the joints. Teeth are sensitive.
“Teeth covered with mucus.”
With all the complaints the stomach gives out, and there is nausea, inability to digest and loathing of food. Vomiting of everything taken, into the stomach; vomiting of even a spoonful of water. In most complaints this remedy is thirstless.
It is an exception that it has thirst. Generally in these attacks of dyspnoea the friends of the patient stand around with a very strong desire to do something, if it is only to hand a glass of water.
This patient is irritated by being offered a swallow of water. He is disturbed, and shows his annoyance.
The child will make an offended grunt when offered water. Thirstlessness with all these bronchial troubles, with copious discharge of mucus and great rattling in the chest.
Sometimes there is an irresistible desire for cold things in the stomach, but it is the exception.
“Desire for acids or acid fruits,” and they make him sick.
Troubles brought on in the stomach from vinegar, from sour things, from sour wine, from sour fruits, as in Ant. crud.
Aversion to milk and every other kind of nourishment, but milk especially makes the patient sick, causing nausea and vomiting.
Flatulence: The stomach and abdomen are greatly distended with flatulence. The abdomen is tympanitic. With the stomach symptoms and bowel symptoms there is this constant nausea, but it is more than a nausea, it is a deadly loathing of every kind of food or nourishment, a nausea with the feeling that if he took anything into the stomach he would die; not merely aversion to food, not merely a common nausea that precedes vomiting, but a deadly loathing of food.
The weakness takes on an increased anxiety, and he increasingly suffocates when he is offered food. Kind-hearted people very often want him to take something, for perhaps he has not taken any food all day, or all night; but the thought of food only increases the dyspnoea, increases his nausea, his loathing and his suffering.
Vomiting: Vomiting is not an easy matter in this remedy. The vomiting is more or less spasmodic.
“Violent retching. Gagging and retching and straining to vomit. Suffocation, gagging, through great torture.”
The stomach seems to take on a convulsive action, and it is with the greatest difficulty, after many of these great efforts, that a little comes up, and then a little more, and this is kept up.
“Vomiting of anything that has been put into the stomach, with quantities of mucus.”
Thick, white, ropy mucus, sometimes with blood.
“Vomits slime, with great exertion. Vomiting large quantities of mucus. Vomits tenacious mucus.”
“Vomiting of slime, with bile. A tough, watery mucus, then some food, then bile.”
But the principle thing vomited is the thick white, ropy mucus, flowing from the mucous membranes everywhere. Tough and stringy; can be drawn out in strings.
The patient is often choked while this thick, ropy, white mucus is expelled from the oesophagus and mouth. The mouth fills up with it. It is a tremendous effort, a spasmodic effort, for this patient to rid the stomach of its contents, which is mucus, or mucus and bile.
Early in the vomiting it is mucus, and after much straining there is a regurgitation of bile into the stomach, and the continuing of vomiting is from bile. The great straining also induces a flow of blood into the stomach, and the contents of the stomach will be streaked with blood.
Ulcerations: Ulceration of mucous membranes everywhere. It has ulcers in the nose and in the larynx, and ulcers that bleed. Bleeding ulcers in the stomach, and so there is vomiting of blood.
Like Antimonium crud., it has been useful in old drunkards.
Drunkards: Old drunkards sometimes take on a debilitated form and take frequent colds.
After getting over a big debauch, having been many days on one of their times, they become relaxed and cold, and take cold, and the chest fills up with mucus, and they are vomiting, suffocating and vomiting.
“Rattling of mucus in the chest of old drunkards.”
Ant. tart. is sometimes required. Antim crud. when the trouble is confined mostly to the stomach. Ant. tart. when the chest symptoms are present with growing anxiety and the coldness and the prostration; prostration from long drinking.
Old gouty patients, old drunkards; old broken down constitutions. In children also that have broken down constitutions, as if they had grown old. These take cold in the chest, with great rattling of mucus and require this remedy.
Very commonly there is anxiety in the stomach, it is not always described as a pain, but an anxious feeling, a deathly sinking, an indescribable sinking in the stomach as if she was going to die.
“Anxiety in the stomach, with nausea.”
A passive congestion of the liver, with vomiting and bile.
Pains: The remedy is also full of cutting pains, cutting like a knife. Pinching in the intestines. Colicky pains. Distension of the abdomen.
The abdomen may be distended with serum, or it may be distended with flatus.
“Sharp, cutting pains, as with knives. Most violent pains in the abdomen.”
Dropsy is one of the natural conditions of all forms of Antimonium. I remember an energetic horse doctor feeding all the horses Black antimony when the epizootic was upon the land, going through all the stables.
I learned, that he was giving Black antimony to all horses and I left instructions that mine should not have any medicine except what I gave. Nearly all the horses that he treated ended in dropsy, and were laid up for days and weeks with the legs wrapped up.
It was a proving of Antimonium. Ant. tart. is full of it. It was a common thing, formerly, for old broken down constitutions to be put on Antim tart. at the end of pneumonia and fevers, but they almost always had bloating of the feet for three or four months after getting up.
If they did not have that, they had “fever sores.”
Antimonium is a common cause of the “fever sore,” the lingering indolent ulcer that forms upon the legs following old fevers in broken down constitutions.
Sometimes they never get rid, of them. They certainly never get rid of them unless they fall into the hands of a prescriber of our school.
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.