Argentum Metallicum


James Tyler Kent describes the symptoms of the homeopathic medicine Argentum Metallicum in great detail and compares it with other homeopathy remedies. …


Generalities: We will take up the study of Metallic silver.

No wonder that this remedy is a very deep acting remedy, for it has been used symbolically, and medically throughout all history.

It has been a valuable substance throughout all history. It is an anti psoric and from its symptoms. I believe it to be an anti-sycotic. It goes into the life. Especially affects the nerves, nerves sheaths. Has complaints along the nerves.

All cartilages in the body are affected by it. It produces a hypertrophy of cartilages, a thickening of the cartilaginous portions of joints, of the cartilage of the ears, and of the nose.

Produces cartilaginous growths and tumors; infiltrations. It affects the nerve substance, it is a deep organic remedy.

It is more than an ordinary remedy, for it affects all there is of man. In those nerve fibers especially that carry messages. It affects the brain in a very profound manner, bringing about changes and a gradual softening.

Mind: A strange feature about it in its general action upon man is that is singles out mostly the intellectual faculties.

It scarcely disturbs his affections; only makes slight and vague changes in his voluntary system.

But the memory, the intellectual part of man is disturbed increasingly to imbecility. In great sufferings and it is full of suffering – it affects his ability to reason.

In nearly all the headaches and pains in the back, and the rending, tearing pains that it produces over the body, it disturbs his memory and reasoning faculties.

Disturbs his ability to think. And it comes on in persons who are in the habit of laboring with the intellectual faculties.

Business men, students, readers, and thinkers. Reasoners come to a point when they can no longer reason and the slightest mental effort brings on vertigo.

He is fatigued. All symptoms are worse after sleep. Instead of being rested for the day, he wakes in the morning with mental fatigue and weakness, so that he can hardly move, and it is with great difficulty that he gets himself together for a mental or physical effort of another day.

Pains: If he undertakes to do any more mental work, he gets a headache. Headache mostly in the front of the head, but also in the occiput.

Another strange feature about it, it is full of rending, tearing pains along the nerves, predominantly of the lower extremities.

Tearing, as if the nerves would be torn in pieces (during rest).

Cold, damp weather, stormy weather will bring on rheumatism – not so much with swelling, although it has that, but pains apparently in the cartilages, and pains along the nerves.

And these pains are so severe that he cannot keep still. Hence, it has a rheumatic state, from cold, damp weather, from becoming chilled, in the joints and in the nerves, so that be walks and walks.

Many symptoms are better from especially walking. So tired and exhausted, but die pain is so severe that it drives him to walk. These pains are many times palliated by copious drafts of coffee, and this will suppress the sickness, and leave upon him all sorts of difficulties, under which he is threatening with break down, and in time be becomes almost useless.

“Mental weakness. Physical prostration.”

Rending, tearing pains, Affections of the joints, the cartilages of the joints. Tearing pains along the bones and he is really a wreck, an old broken down constitution when he is yet young.

“A man of forty is like one of eighty.”

All these pains are better from motion.

Again, it full of infiltrations. Inflamed cartilages infiltrate and form into hard knots. A superabundance of cartilaginous tissue, so that round about the joints the cartilages are thickened.

In the ear and nose the cartilage is thickened. The infiltration that belongs to epithelioma. It has been a wonderful palliative in scirrhus, and in epithelioma. It has cured epithelioma.

It is on record as curing pp epithelioma of the cervix uteri.

Ulceration everywhere; but ulcers that have their beginning in the cartilaginous tissue and. break out through the cellular tissue, and copiously discharge. The ulcers infiltrate at. their base, and become hard.

Another marked feature is that it affects both testes, but it has a predominant action in the right. The left ovary and the right testis.

Such things are singular, that in one sex it should produce symptoms in one side of the body, and in the other sex on the, opposite side.

It has cured. all sorts of tumors enlargement of the ovary, and infiltrations of the tissues. It is a chilly remedy. Wants to be kept warm and its pains are ameliorate by heat.

Its headaches are ameliorated by heat – are ameliorated by pressure, by bandaging. I have orated by heat. I have many times cured these symptoms in headaches when the patient had the head wrapped up.

Now, in this medicine we class the patient as one having a lack of vital heat. He wants to be warm. Likely to be lean, growing increasingly lean, increasingly nervous, increasingly sensitive.

Takes on all sorts of whims. Women needing Silver very often do such strange and unaccountable things in (compare Argentum nitricum) their nervous states that they bar out all sympathy of their friends, and are called hysterical.

Deep seated trouble of the nerves. Growing increasingly sensitive to surroundings.

Now, the mental state of Argentum met. is just such as is aroused by confusion, just such as is I aroused by the emotions, just such as the loss of balance from fear, from anger, from fright, from disturbance of the mind.

Because this patient is so sensitive to his surroundings and so disturbed by annoyance. With his pains he becomes delirious, and it is not that involuntary delirium that we see in low forms of fever, but he becomes wild and full of rage.

He takes on mental excitement, rage and a state in which he talks nonsense with great rapidity. Sometimes there is a stage of unusual excitement in his conversation all mixed up about the character of his thought.

All of the time looks as if he were intoxicated, and he flies from one subject to an other, and prattles. For a moment appearing to be very intense and very active in mind, and forgets all that he was talking about.

In society indisposition to talk.

Because he is incompetent. He is tired mentally and he forgets what he is talking about. Loses the thread of his discourse; and he dreads to talk because he gets complaints while talking. If compelled to answer, he becomes dizzy, and feels strange all over, and has nervous shakes or shocks.

And shocks go over him when tired like an electric shock. It comes suddenly, but the most favourable time for that to come is just when he wants to go to sleep. He thinks, now he is away from all the troubles of the day and can, rest, and the instant sleep comes over him he is roused from head to foot a shock, and another one, and another one, sometimes the whole night he jerks from head to foot.

His limbs jerks up, his lower limbs twitch and jerk, then he gets out of bed and walks – tries to walk it off. This comes out in the proving of Argentum nitricum, but it belongs as much to Argentum met., and Argentum met. has long cured it. In Hahnemann’s study of the remedy he lays down the importance of shock on going to sleep. Shocks in the limbs.

But it is an electric shock that causes the whole body to jerk. Anxious about the health. Thinks he is certainly breaking down, for he is growing weaker. He cannot walk, though he is growing increasingly restless. He cannot exercise mentally or physically without distress. From meditation or as soon as he enters a warm room he becomes dizzy and that is an exception belonging to a few of the head troubles and the sensorium; he usually is sensitive to cold. In the house when the room is close he becomes dizzy.

It has been an astonishing feature in this remedy that precisely at the hour of no great many troubles come on, and the pains and Hess Chills. Pains in the ovary at noon. Dizziness with vertigo as if intoxicated.

The headaches are frontal and occipital. One-sided brain affection. One-sided headaches. Violent neuralgia in the head upon one side at a time, as if deep in the brain, as if involving one-half of the brain, Mostly the headaches have been on the right side-the one-sided headaches.

Those broken down patients that have become prostrated and over-wrought by exposure to the sun. Upon the scalp, the ears, here and there upon the body, itching places.

Itching and burning, like frost bite. It has an itching and burning like Agaricus, in the toes, in the ears, and he scratches the part, and scratching does not relieve it until the skin is off, until it oozes, but no relief from scratching.

Rawness in the ears, kept up by constantly boring and scratching in the ears. Scratching the skin off because of the tingling, itching and burning.

Eyes: Another strange feature is that about the eyes. Silver affects the lids more than the globe. It affects the sight, producing dimness of vision, and loss of vision; but it produces infiltration of the lids, thickening of the lids until they are almost as hard as cartilage.

James Tyler Kent
James Tyler Kent (1849–1916) was an American physician. Prior to his involvement with homeopathy, Kent had practiced conventional medicine in St. Louis, Missouri. He discovered and "converted" to homeopathy as a result of his wife's recovery from a serious ailment using homeopathic methods.
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.