If you were about to produce a Calcarea carbonica subject to order you could do so by feeding him lime or lime water until the digestive organs were so debilitated that they could no longer digest lime; and then the tissues would be increasingly deprived of what they need, and give us the lime subject, the “bone salt inanition” case, for that is really what it is. Infants that are fed lime water in the milk will in a little while be lime subjects.
They will soon get in such a state that they cannot take the lime from their natural food, and the result will be a Calcarea subject such as we are about to describe.
But the natural cases are those that have a natural sickness, are born so, born with an inability to digest the lime that is in their natural food, and they grow fat and flabby, and produce deficient bones.
There is a greater proportion of cartilaginous material in the bones than lime, and the bones bend, and take on diseases and destructive troubles. Deficient teeth, or no teeth at all. The bones simply stop growing, and the patient goes into marasmus.
What a foolish notion it is to feed that infant lime water because he cannot digest lime! Is it not just as reasonable as anything else in allopathy? And yet our homeopaths use allopathic medicines. They use the lowest potencies they can get and it would seem strange if those substances cured any better in the hands of the homeopath than in the hands of the allopath.
Nor, it is astonishing that one single dose of the potency suitable to meet the state of disorder will make that infant commence to digest its food, and appropriate from its food the lime substance that it needs in its bones, and wherever else it needs it.
All at once the teeth begin to grow; the bones begin to grow, and the legs get stiff enough for him to begin to walk, and they will hold up. It is astonishing what changes will take place under the various medicines that are suitable for the disturbances of the hair, and the bones and nails.
The remedy must be sufficiently potentized to correspond with the wrong. It certainly must not be crude because the child is already stunted by the crude material. You will see within a month or six weeks after giving a solitary dose of the sufficiently potentized remedy the nails that were corrugated and uneven and spotted and irregular will form a margin and will grow out smooth.
You will see the ugly little crowns upon the teeth, distorted, and black things as they come up out of the gums; but when they have been under the suitable homeopathic remedy you will see them form a margin line, and from there on the teeth look healthy, and from there on the little body of the tooth is smooth and round; just as if that child bad had an impulse to grow better teeth.
That same thing probably takes place where the bones exist. The periosteum takes on healthy work.
This is the Calcarea state when the patient needs lime and he cannot get it because he has been cloyed; or, because he has an indigestion, he is unable to assimilate the lime that is in his food, and it goes through him and does not affect him.
So it is with much of the sickness we have, an inability to extract from the food and assimilate such things as the body needs. Would not anyone be a simpleton to suppose that he had been the cause of the building of a tooth?
You do not build mole hills out of our high potencies; they simply establish a state of order, so that digestion and assimilation go on, order is established and the tissues are improved.
Health comes, beauty, a growth of hair, better skin, better nails.
The Calcarea constitution is what we want to know. We do not need to know that the individual has been poisoned by lime; it is not worth much to know it, because that is not the index to the remedy. If indigestion of lime has been brought about by lime, it may need one of ten other remedies to overcome that indigestion for lime.
It is not always Calcarea that covers the symptoms. The medicine that covers the symptoms is the one that will change the economy from an abnormal to a normal state, and digestion will become orderly, and we will have growth and prosperity in the economy.
Aspect: The Calcarea case is to be known by the symptoms, and not by the fact that the patient has been poisoned by lime; the chances are that those we have to treat have never had any lime. Many of them have never been poisoned by lime but have been unable to assimilate lime from birth.
Calcarea is full of congestions, determination of blood to the head cold feet; hot head; congestion of the chest. Calcarea corresponds in a very high degree to the chlorotic and anaemic, pale and waxy, and in spite of this plump. It has both fat, flabby and pale patients and it has emaciated states, too.
Muscles emaciate. Emaciated about the neck; emaciated about the neck and from there downwards. Anemic conditions; pale, waxy, sickly; pale lips; pale ears; pale fingers; pale and yellowish.
Chlorosis is a word especially relating to the anemia of girls. A large number of remedies is indicated in those conditions, but Calcarea produces the kind of anemia known as chlorosis. It produces most pernicious anemia.
Great relaxation in the tissues everywhere; relaxation of muscles; relaxation of veins; relaxation of the walls of blood-vessels to such a great extent, especially in the lower limbs and anus, that there are marked hemorrhoidal manifestations or marked varicose veins in the legs. Distended veins, burning in these varicose veins. Burning and smarting. Bleeding and oozing. Inflammation and painful swelling of joints.
Glands: Another marked feature running through the remedy is its tendency to attack glands, the glands of the neck, all of the glands of the body, especially the lymphatic glands.
The lymphatic glands in the abdomen become hard, inflamed and sore, like great nodules, like hickory nuts; tubercular. Calcarea is useful in tubercular formations.
Calcareous degenerations, calcareous glands, induration of glands. It is useful in indurations in ulcers, and the base of ulcers, and round about ulcers, hence its wonderful use in palliating and restraining the growth of malignant ulcers, as malignant ulcers always have an indurated base.
Old cancerous ulcers are greatly restrained in their growth, that is, the constitutional state is much improved, the patient himself has more endurance and the ulcers will take on healing. In cancerous affections that would kill in sixteen months the patient will live five years with Calcarea, if Calcarea is indicated.
That is something, and in any times that is all that can be expected in a cancerous growth.
In glandular affections where the glands round about are infiltrated and hard, where there is much burning and stinging pain, where the growth has invaded and appropriated the surrounding tissues so that there are adhesions, matters are serious.
There is malignancy in almost all these cases. They differ entirely from glands that are loose from the skin, glands that roll under the skin, and have no fibrous attachment. Cancerous affections burn and sting. Calcarea cures many tumors, fatty, cystic, if the symptoms agree, so strongly is it related to this building tip process in glands. It builds up glands and bone.
Another thing running through the remedy is a pyoemic state, in which there are abscesses in deep muscles. Abscesses deep in the neck, deep in the thigh, in the abdomen.
You will be astonished to learn that Calcarea will take care of the abscess (when the symptoms agree), and it will not break. I have many times seen an abscess disappear when fluctuation was most positive. I have seen those abscesses disappear when pus was shown to he present by the needle; I have not only seen the abscesses go away, but also the pyoemic state which was prior to it. We have but a few medicines that will do that.
There is something singular about this. Why does Calcarea favor the resorption of that fluid and encourage the part to become calcareous?
It is more than I am able to explain, but it does it when the symptoms agree. But Sulph. and Silicea, when their symptoms agree hasten suppuration. But Calcarea has that peculiar action of concentrating and contracting.
One may be indicated in one case, the other may be indicated in the other. There are times when Silicea is indicated and the abscess is in such a dangerous place. Then if Silicea is given the result that naturally belongs to the spreading of that abscess is dangerous; in such an instance the surgeon must be called to drain the abscess in a safe manner, even when we know that if that abscess were located in a safe place, it would be far better for that patient to have the remedy he needs.
Sometimes the periosteum is injured by a hammer striking it through muscles, injuring or contusing the periosteum. Inflammation will set in, pus will form rapidly, and if Calcarea is indicated by the constitution of the patient the surgeon’s knife is entirely useless, and a most detrimental thing.
But in thinking from the old standpoint, the physician who knows nothing about Homoeopathy, and the wonders of our homeopathic remedies, would hold up his hands in horror.
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.