The Calcarea patient has a catarrh in the nose, with more or less discharge; at his best he has considerable discharge. But he goes into a cold place, the discharge is slacked up, and he gets a headache. Headache over the eyes. Congestion of the head; back of the head.
“Tearing headache above the eyes down to nose,” is a strong symptom of Calcarea.
It seems sometimes as if a great wedge were lip in there. This is relieved by very hot applications. It is relieved in the dark; it is aggravated in the daylight. He must go into dark room and lie down for relief.
Sometimes this headache is ameliorated by lying down in the dark. This headache continues to grow worse during the day, until in the evening it becomes so severe that it is at tended with nausea and vomiting.
It is one of the forms of constitutional headache, is a headache that sometimes occurs once in two weeks. Headache every seven days, or headache once in two weeks. Periodical headaches. Sick headache, the old-fashioned American sick-headache.
There is commonly a periodicity belonging to it, of seven to fourteen days, but again, it comes on whenever he is exposed, by riding in the wind, for he is a very chilly patient, if he becomes really chilled or very cold, he gets a headache, a sick-headache.
Then, again, it has pain in the left side of the head. One-sided headache. Headache worse from noise, from talking, but ameliorated in the evening, from lying in the dark. It has headache in the temples, and this headache seems to draw through to the root of the nose.
The headaches from the supraorbital region draw through to the nose. Headaches in the temples seem to produce a feeling of tightness, a feeling of great tension in the forehead. Headaches worse from motion, from walking, from talking.
Most of the Calcarea headaches, as soon as they become severe, are attended with pulsation. The pulsation is so strong that the patient is not satisfied by merely saying it is a pulsation, he describes it as hammering. Most of the pains are pressive or tearing.
“Concussive headaches.”
Stitching, pulsating pains in the head, as if it would split. Headaches worse from walking, and from a jar. Sometimes he feels a coldness in the head, it seems as if the cold head is numb, cold as if made of wood. He sometimes feels this numbness, and describes it as if he had a cap, sometimes as if there were a helmet, on the head.
Now, all of these sensations are difficult to describe, but sometimes they are one and the same thing. All the headaches of Calcarea, are more or less congestive. It is a peculiar feature of Calcarea, that the more marked the congestion of internal parts, the colder the surface becomes.
With chest troubles, and stomach troubles, and bowel troubles, the feet and hands become like ice, W covered with sweat; and he lies in bed sometimes with a fever in the rest of his body, and the scalp covered with cold sweat.
That is strange. You cannot account for that by any process of reasoning in pathology, and when a thing is so strange that it cannot be accounted, for, it become very valuable as descriptive of the remedy, and is one that cannot generally be left out when prescribing for a patient.
That is almost a general state, it is so marked. It has burning in the vertex, and this is often present coldness of the forehead, or the whole head may feel cold except a burning spot on the vertex. Calcarea will again have cold head and icy cold feet when walking in cold air or in very cold weather; but as soon as the feet get warm, they go to the other extreme, and burn so that he puts them out of bed.
This has often led inexperienced prescribers to prescribe Sulph., because that is a keynote of Sulph. All keynote prescribers give Sulph. whenever the patient puts the feet out of bed, but a number of remedies have burning feet, hot feet, so we are not limited to Sulph. Calcarea has affections of the bones of the skull, the outer part of the head.
Slow formation of bone. The fontanelles remain open a long time. It has hydrocephalic conditions, effusion in the membranes, and the bones do not grow and keep pace with the growth of the head, and hence the sutures commence to separate and the head grows wider, and larger all the time, with hydrocephalus.
In hydrocephalic children this sweating head is a common feature. The child lies at night upon the pillow, and the sweat pours from the head and wets the pillow all around; especially sweating at night.
In persons suffering from softening of the brain, the pillow is wet all around the head. Children going through difficult dentition have dreadful times in their dreams, they screech out in the night, and the pillow is wet all around their head.
Old plethoric patients, broken down constitutions, fat, flabby, lymphatic patients, with enlarged glands, with sweating of the head, cold sweating of the head. The hair falls out, not in the regular way such as occurs in old ago bit in patches here and there.
You see a bald spot on the side of the head, or the back of the head; a tuft of hair has come out, or in two or three places. Then it has eruptions upon the head and face; eczema that we find in children and infants.
“Thick scabs on the head, with yellow pus.”
Eyes: Offensive eruptions. The eye comes in for a share of troubles, and Calcarea is one of the best friends the oculist has, if he knows how to use it. It is not especially suitable for every inflammation, but in those fat, flabby constitutions, where every cold settles in the eyes, and produces an inflammation, and this goes on for a few days, and ulceration begins, then study Calcarea.
Vesicles are formed and break and spread into an ulcer. From exposure of the feet in water, from riding in the wind, from cold, damp weather he gets eye troubles. Ulceration of the cornea. In all of the complaints of the eyes and of the head the photophobia is so marked that the Calcarea subject when he is at all disturbed cannot even stand ordinary light, and to be out in the sunlight is extremely painful, and many times inflammations are started from merely going into a bright sunlight, from steady looking, and from straining the eyes.
All kinds of exertions bring on headaches and eye troubles. Tension, because one muscle is weak. There is a disturbance of accommodation. Worse from every exertion of the eyes; you see that is like its generals, that is, aggravated from exertion.
He cannot endure any prolonged exertion; you see that is just as true of his parts as the whole. You know that reading, writing and looking at one thing all are marked exertions. With Calcarea, the part itself is worse from exertion, and the whole body is worse from exertion.
Calcarea has cured cataract. Calcarea has other disturbances of the eyes, in connection with head troubles, in connection with fevers, and when he is out of sorts from great exertion; he so easily gets into a fidgety state, confusion of mind that is almost a delirium, and on closing the eyes he sees the most horrible visions, specters, ghosts.
Long before any disturbance can be observed in the tissues, or in the retina, or any disturbance of the eye by looking into it with the ophthalmoscope he will complain of seeing smoke, or steam in the air before his field of vision, as if looking through a veil, as if looking through a cloud, all meaning the same thing.
“Dim vision.” His vision is weak.
The muscles are weak. He suffers from dim vision, which is going on gradually to blindness as he grows increasingly weak. All of his eye symptoms, and his headaches, and his nervous symptoms arc aggravated from reading, from writing, from looking steadily at one thing.
He is very much exhausted after such an exertion and will have tearing pains over the eyes, behind the eyes in the head. That is a peculiar kind of a headache, such as he is in the habit of having. It may be in any part of head.
Called eye-strain. It is a wonderful remedy for eye-strain (Onosmodium). Calcarea has cured many cases of opacity of the cornea (Bar, iod.). In an old case a cure can never be promised. It is one of the results of disease, and we never know when we are going to remove the results of disease, because the intelligent homeopath never prescribes for the results of disease. He prescribes for the patient. An opacity itself, when it is present, is not a symptom, but a result of disease.
Often when a patient is prescribed for on his general symptoms, such a state of opacity of the cornea will, after a while, begin to pass away. The patient grows better, feels better himself. His symptoms commence to subside, and after the symptoms have subsided pathological conditions will commence to subside.
Do not be discouraged in prescribing if the pathological conditions do not go away; but if all the symptoms of the patient have gone away, and the patient is eating well, and is sleeping well, and doing well, do not feel that it is impossible for that opacity of the cornea to go away, for sometimes it will.
I have known patients to come back, years later, even after I had given them up as cured, as their symptoms had all disappeared, and I was foolish enough to say to the patient,
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.