The same are found in the vomited matter and in the stools. The expectoration is horribly offensive, so much so that you soon get the idea that there is a state of gangrene.
The patient is at this time going into a state that perhaps cannot be any better described than a gangrenous inflammation; there will be signs to indicate the inflammatory condition, and there will be the smell of the expectoration which you will detect as soon as you open the door,
The expectoration is a thin, watery fluid intermingled with clots. In the pan you will find this watery expectoration looking like prune juice, and in the midst of it will be clots of blood; the offensiveness is horrible. He has gone through the period of restlessness and is now prostrated, sinking, pallid, and likely enough covered with a cold sweat.
Stomach and bowels: When we come to the stomach we find everything that may be called a gastritis, vomiting of everything taken, even a teaspoonful of water, extreme irritation of the stomach, great prostration, horrible anxiety; dry mouth; a very little hot water will sometimes comfort him for a minute, but soon it must come up; cold fluids are vomited immediately. The whole oesophagus is in a state of inflammation; everything burns that comes up or goes down. Vomiting of bile and blood.
Extreme sensitiveness of the stomach is present; he does not want to be touched. Heat applied externally relieves, and there is a temporary relief from warm drinks; the heat is grateful. In the bowels we have much trouble; this remedy has all the symptoms of peritonitis; distension of the abdomen, a tympanitic state; cannot be handled or touched, yet he will keep moving because he is so restless, he cannot keep still, but finally he becomes so weak that exhaustion takes the place of restlessness.
Dysentery is likely to come on, with involuntary passages of urine and faeces, one or both, with haemorrhage from the bowels and bloody urine.
As the bowels move, we get the cadaveric odor to the stool, a smell like putrid flesh. The stool is bloody, watery, brown like prune juice, or black and horribly offensive.
Sometimes dysenteric in character with dreadful straining and burning of the anus; every stool burns as though there were coals of fire in the rectum; burning it! the bowels, burning all the way through. The pain in the abdomen is better from the application of hot things. The tympanitic condition is extreme.
Sometimes there is a gastro-enteritis that takes on a gangrenous character that in olden times used to be talked about as gangrene of the bowel, a mortification that always ended in death.
A thick, bloody discharge is passed with a horrible odor, all substances are vomited, the patient desires to be in a very warm room, wants to be well covered, wants hot applications and warm drinks, looks cadaveric and smells cadaveric, with a dry, pungent odor that penetrates everything, but if he wants the covers off, wants a cool room and windows open, wants to be sponged with cold water, and wants ice cold drinks then he must have Secale.
Bowels: I want to warn you against the too promiscuous use of Arsenic in the summer complaints of young babies, for dysentery and cholera infantum. It has so many little symptoms that are so common to these complaints. that if you do not look out and are not warned you will be likely to give your patient Arsenic, suppress some of the symptoms, changing the aspect of the case so that you cannot find a remedy for it and yet not cure the case with Arsenic.
There is a strong tendency to be routine and give Arsenic without a sufficient number of generals being present; i.e., if you give it on particulars and not on the generals of the case.
This medicine is full of diarrhea and dysenteric symptoms; in these conditions there will be the pallor, the anxiety, the cadaveric aspect and the cadaveric odors.
In the dysentery there is most distressing and frequent urging to stool, scanty, slimy, black, fluid, inky stools with cadaveric smell, great prostration, restlessness and pallor. In the bowel troubles, in low forms of disease, the stool becomes involuntary.
This is a condition of the rectum, a relaxation of the rectum, great prostration. Involuntary stool generally indicates either local or general exhaustion, and in this remedy there is terrible exhaustion, so that there is involuntary diarrhea in typhoid and in low forms of zymotic disease; involuntary urine.
Purging is sometimes present in Arsenic, but generally be does not have much purging, such as we find in Podophyllum, Phosphorus ac. Usually there will be little, frequent gushes, little spurts with flatus and the great exhaustion that occurs in cholera, little spurts with mucus, slimy, whitish stools.
Arsenic is not so commonly indicated in cholera, i. e., during the gushing period, but sometimes after the gushing is over and the vomiting and purging have passed, leaving a state of extreme exhaustion, we have a state that appears like coma, the patient looks almost as if dead, except that he breathes. We find, then, that Arsenicum will establish reaction.
Cholera infantum with great prostration, sinking and cadaveric appearance, great coldness, covered with told sweat, cold extremities, cold as death; cadaveric, sickly, foul, pungent, penetrating odor in the room from the faeces and urine and even of what is vomited.
The passages from the bowels are acrid, excoriating, causing redness and burning. Very often the burning extends into the bowels.
The rectum and anus burn, smarting all about the anus. It has tenesmus, painful, unbearable urging, great distress in the lower bowel, in rectum and anus, terrible state of anxiety of the patient and the pain is so violent and the suffering so intense, the anguish so intense, that he can think of nothing but death the fearfulness and frightful feelings are such as he has never experience in his life, and he feels confident these mean he is going to die.
This, like all other complaints, is attended with restlessness, and when not at stool he is walking the floor, going from bed to chair and from chair to bed. He will get on the stool and then back to bed, then he is hurried to stool again, sometimes he loses it.
Sometimes there is a chronic hoemorrhoidal state with burning, and the hemorrhoids protrude when at stool, he is much exhausted after getting back into bed after a stool, with these protruding lumps which are like grapes and feel like coals of fire. They are hot, dry and bleeding. Fissures of the rectum that bleed at every stool, with burning Itching and eczematous eruptions about the anus with burning.
This kind of pain may be felt anywhere in the body; burning is characteristic of Arsenic, stitching is characteristic of Arsenic. Now, put these together and the patient often describes it as being stuck with red hot needless all over him. This red hot sensation, which is a common feature all over, is felt at the anus, and especially when there are hemorrhoids, burning and sticking like hot needles in the hemorrhoids
At times when a patent is coming down with the early stage of a violent attack he will have all the rigor and chill that it is possible to find in the Materia Medica and that can be found in disease. Rigors and chills of violent character, and at such times he describes a feeling as if the blood flowing through the vessels were ice water. He feels a rushing through the body of ice cold waves.
When the fever comes on, he is intensely hot from head to foot, before the sweat has appeared, he feels that boiling water is going through the blood vessels. Then comes on the sweat and dyspnoea and all complaints in which he is prostrated and becomes cold.
While the sweat some times relieves the fever and pains, yet it is prolonged and attended with great exhaustion and does not relieve his exhaustion.
Many of his complaints are increased with the sweat; for instance, thirst is increased, the drinking is copious and does not relieve, it seems he cannot get enough and patients will say:
“I can drink the well dry,” or
“Give me a bucket of water.”
Such things are indicative of the state of thirst. During the fever he wants little and often; during the chill he wants hot drinks.
Arsenicum is a very useful medicine in the eruptions of the genitals with burning.
In little ulcers that burn, even when they are syphilitic; herpetic vesicles that appear upon the foreskin and upon the labia; chancre or cancroids with burning, smarting and stinging, but especially in those that are weak, that offer no willingness to heal, but that do the very opposite, that spread, those that we call phagedenic, those that eat from their outer margins, become larger and larger.
Ulcerations: Arsenic and Merc corr. are the two principal medicines for spreading ulcerations such as eat in every direction, very offensive. Such ulcerations as follow the opening of a bubo in the inguinal region where there is no tendency to heal.
A little, watery, offensive discharge keeps coming and extending, ulceration keeps spreading round about the opening, no tendency to heal.
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.
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