Caladium is a wonderful remedy; perhaps some of you have read It endeavoring to understand it; it is a difficult medicine to understand, because it is quite evident from the provings that the prover did not understand how to describe and report symptoms; did not know how to tell his sensations because they were so strange; he could not relate his mental state.
Mind: An individual puts his mind to bear upon something which seems to have taken place during the day, but he is not quite sure whether it took place or not; he thinks the matter over, and yet he cannot be really sure whether it took place or not, until he actually goes and puts his hands upon the object thought about; proves to himself by actual contact and observation that his vague impression was so, that it was true, then he goes away and again he is undecided as to whether it was so or not.
This relates to things that actually happened.
“Very forgetful, he cannot remember,” etc.
This led to the use of Caladium for a good many different kinds of mental affections, loss of memory where there is that vague state of mind.
It might be bordering upon imbecility, it might be the borderland of insanity. All day long he finds himself looking into the things that should have been done; they have simply escaped his mind; he has forgotten them. So the mind is worn through in places.
A state of absent-mindedness. It may come on in an acute state, with unconsciousness. There is a good deal of congestion of the brain, more or less excitement, but more important is prostration of the mind, weakness of the mind; feeble-minded; inability to perform intellectual work, it is impossible.
He cannot think; the more thought he puts upon a thing the more fatigue he has and the further away that thing seems to be; the more he attempts it the less concentrated is the mind upon a subject. It is not strange, then, that the provers themselves were unable to put these ideas into speech so as to give us an intelligent idea of proving. It is only by reading between the lines, using the remedy and studying it that we can straighten out this tangled skein.
“Very thoughtful, absentminded.”
There is in acute states delirium, excitement of mind, unconsciousness, stupefaction. As the febrile state is continued, we have this mental state. This remedy is useful in fevers that are continued.
One of the most important things to decide when we are going into the mental state of a remedy is whether we shall use this remedy in hysteria, in the delirium of the various phases of fever, or in insanity, and to ascertain this we turn to that part of the proving which gives us the pace of the remedy.
If we want to understand the delirium of Belladonna and Bryonia to see which one would be suitable in a certain case, we turn to the febrile action of the remedy and see what the nature of that is; the pace tells us largely what kind of delirium, if we do not know from the delirium itself.
So we will see that in Belladonna there is no continued fever, and as a remedy must, in its very nature, be adapted to the very nature of the disease, it would be useless to follow the many injunctions that are written in our books telling us to give Belladonna in the acute form of delirium: in typhoid fever; but Bryonia has just that condition; hence we will see that Bryonia is useful in such cases which present symptoms similar to it, because the pace of the disease is similar to the pace of Bryonia, which has continued fever.
Belladonna has intermittent and remittent fever, particularly remittent, and hence the acute delirium of Belladonna is similar to the acute delirium of remittent fever. Now to bring this point to bear; this remedy’s fever is a continued fever it has not great amount of fever in it, but it is a continued fever we shall see that there is coma and stupor from fever;
“delirium, unintelligible murmuring; ” mental prostration.
This remedy is suitable in low, murmuring, exhaustive cases of typhoid fever, cases that are running a very sluggish course; not a very active delirium; but muttering; a low form of semi consciousness, very often coma or stupefaction like Phosphorus ac., a dazed mind.
Forgetfulness in persons who are mentally and physically prostrated from sexual excesses or from tobacco poisoning. It is indicated in old debauches who are unable to perform the marital act. He has the most tantalizing craving for the opposite sex with no ability to perform coitus. Lascivious ideas.
Such men stand on the street corner and feast upon the forms of passing girls, and their semen dribbles away; a state also found in Picric acid and Selenium.
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.