Bryonia alba Generalities: Every medicine has a sphere of action, a peculiar nature whereby it differs from all other medicines, and hence it becomes suitable to complaints of one class and not suitable to those of another.
It is like the nature of human beings, as they differ from each other, and also like the nature of diseases, which differ from each other in character.
We study a remedy also in regard to its velocity and continuance, its remittence or intermittence.
The symptoms of some remedies come on suddenly, with great violence, with great rapidity, stay but a short time in their paroxysm, and go off as it nothing had happened.
Others come on slowly, are deep acting and continuous, like the continued fevers. We notice the complaints of Ignatia, how flitting and intermittent and unexpected everything is; we notice in Aconite how complaints come on with violence, and in Belladonna with what suddenness they come on.
When we come to the study of Bryonia alba, we find it is a most persistent remedy; its complaints develop slowly, i.e., slowly for acute conditions.
Its complaints are continuous, remittent, and only occasionally intermittent.
They increase into violence, but the violence is not the first flash as in Aconite or Belladonna, and hence it conforms to a type of disease with continued fever; to rheumatisms that come with gradually increasing severity, gradually increasing and involving one joint after another, until all the white fibrous tissues are in a state of inflammation, pain and distress.
It has inflammatory conditions anywhere about the body, but particularly of the fibrous tissues, serous membranes, ligaments of joints and aponeuroses. It also affects the coating of nerves with its congestions, and these gradually increase in severity.
From the beginning there are present the characteristic features, and it may be seen that this patient is coming down with a Bryonia sickness.
The patient has several days of preparation. He does not feel very well, is languid and tired, does not want to be spoken to, does not want to move, and this gradually increases; pains begin to flit over the body, they move around here and there over the fibres in one place and another, and every time he moves the pain increase, until they end in a steady and continuous pain. The parts become hot and inflamed, and at last he is down with rheumatism.
The complaints come on after taking cold, not the first few hours, as in Aconite or Bell., but the day after an exposure he begins to feel uneasy and he sneezes and the nose discharges, there is rawness in the chest, and in a day or so he has a chill and comes down with some inflammatory trouble, pneumonia or pleurisy.
Its inflammatory complaints include inflammation of the membranes of the brain, sometimes extending, into the cord; the pleural membranes, the peritoneum and the heart covering, these are the most common; it also has inflammation of organs.
When these conditions come on there is noticed, very early in the case, even before the pains begin, an aversion to motion, and the patient does not know why, but finally he observes that his symptoms are made worse if he has to move, so that the slightest inclination to move is resisted with a feeling of anger, and when he does move he finds he is aroused to great suffering, and that all the aches and pains of the body come on.
Thus we have the well-known Bryonia alba aggravation from motion. This runs all through the remedy.
This medicine is suitable in a great many diseases, diseases of a typhoid nature, diseases that take on a symptomatic typhoid, diseases that start out as remittents and run into a continued fever, as in pneumonia, pleurisy, inflammation of the liver, of glands, of the bowels, etc.
It may be a gastro-enteritis or peritonitis, or inflammation of the bowels, with the sensitiveness, the aggravation from motion and the desire to keep perfectly still. Inflammation of joints, whether of rheumatic character or not, whether from cold, exposure or injury.
Bryonia alba is often indicated in injuries of joints where Arnica would be a failure.
There is an extreme state of irritability in Bryonia; every word which compels him to answer a question or to think will aggravate him.
The effort to talk will be attended with horror. At the beginning of complaints you go to the bedside of a patient who has been grumbling a few days; something is evidently coming on; the family meet you at the door and say,
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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