Women: The woman, such as I have described, oversensitive to pain, snappish, suffering intensely from a little pain, takes on many symptoms at the menstrual period. The menstrual flow is black, clotted, offensive. Cramping pains in the uterus, clutching and griping, ameliorated by heat.
“Oversensitive to pain,” with all the pains and complaints, and the mental state, the irritability, the snappish mental state at a menstrual period. Whether it be a menorrhagia, or a metrorrhagia, there are copious black clots.
“Menstrual colic following anger,” which means violent cramping pains in the uterus during menstruation if she has had any great excitement to anger her. Sexual irritability, emotions, disturbance of mind, will bring on cramps at the menstrual period in a woman who is not subject to cramps, affecting her as if she had taken cold.
It is a very useful remedy in membranous dysmenorrhoea. It, perhaps, has existed from the first menstrual period. Every month the woman throws off a little membranous formation. This is thrown off with violent labor-like pains, and often with clots.
Chamomilla may be a palliative. It is not the constitutional remedy that clears away, and prevents the future formation of this membrane, like the deeper antipsorics, but it is often palliative in the more severe attacks, with the irritable condition of the mind; feverish condition, ameliorated by heat; cramping, and clutching like labor pains,
“Yellow, smarting leucorrhoea.
Excessive menstruation; blood dark, nearly black, clotted, with pain through from back to front, attacks of syncope, coldness of limbs, much thirst.”
Pregnancy: In pregnancy the woman has also Chamomilla conditions. Irregular contractions; false labor pains. Labor pains that are felt in wrong places. Labor pains that are felt too much in the back.
Contractions that are most painful, cutting, tearing, bringing out screams. so irritable; she scolds the pains; she scolds the doctor; she scolds everybody; drives the doctor out of the room; drives the nurse off, and then calls for her again; refuses things that are offered.
Labor pains that are clutching here, and clutching there, and cramping, showing that certain fibres of the uterus are contracting in one direction, and certain other fibres in another. There is not that uniform, regular contraction that should take place in the expulsion of the contents of the uterus; expulsion of a mole or expulsion of a child.
If the physician can have the pregnant woman under his care during the period of gestation he ought to be able to select remedies to remove these irregular contractions of the uterus, or to prevent them when it comes time for labor. The pains are then not so violent. She feels the contractions, but in many instances they are painless.
You will not always be able to prepare women, they will not always permit it. Women are more inclined to be notional and whimsical and to have their own way a short time before confinement than at any other time. A woman ought to be under treatment all through, gestation, and sometimes it takes longer.
Gestation is a fortuitous time for the woman to take treatment. Symptoms representative of her disordered state come out then that do not appear at any other time. If she has a psoric condition it may remain dormant until pregnancy comes on, which may act as an exciting cause to bring out the conditions that are in the constitution.
It furnishes, therefore, a good time for the homoeopathic physician to study the case and give that woman a constitutional remedy based upon those symptoms that will not only remove those symptoms and prepare her for confinement, but will remove very much of the disorder in her economy, and she will go on through life liberated from much distress, cured from many conditions that perhaps would not have come out until some other occasion brought them out.
A woman that knows much about Homoeopathy would submit herself regularly to constitutional treatment during gestation, that is, would be particular to give the physician everything, all the details, all the sufferings, all the trouble, that he may study that case.
The things that are to be observed during gestation are to be added to the constitutional. symptoms found when gestation is not present, because they are all evidence of a disturbance in that one patient. And it is the patient that is to be treated, not a disease. It is simply another form of disturbance, of disorder of the economy.
The things that Chamomilla reaches during confinement, and during its course, and at the close of it, are irregular contractions, like hourglass contractions.
“Rigidity of the os.”
After confinement, after pains. With all these the same mental condition, the same oversensitiveness to pain.
“Postpartum hemorrhage.”
Every time the child is put to the breast, cramping of the uterus; cramp in the back. Either of these, or both, Chamomilla cures. The two principal remedies you will have to rely on for these conditions, cramping in the back and cramping in the abdomen every time the child is put to die breast, are Chamomilla and Pulsatilla.
They are two decidedly different remedies in the mental sphere. One is mild and gentle, though whimsical; and the other is snappish and irritable. Both are sensitive to pain, but Chamomilla is far more sensitive to pain than Pulsatilla.
Chamomilla has inflammation of the mammary glands. You cannot prescribe for that unless you have something along with it, and I am sure you will recognize a Chamomilla patient. The woman goes into convulsions.
At the beginning of the confinement the husband comes into the room in some snappish way,
“to make his wife behave herself;” it makes her mad, and she goes into convulsions.
The doctor, perhaps, has just turned his back upon it, but now he says,
“Well, why did I not think to give this woman a dose of Chamomilla?
If I had done that I would have prevented these convulsions.”
She becomes very philosophical after a dose of Chamomilla, and often goes to sleep.
Chest, cough and respiration: There are many suffocative attacks and difficulties of breathing, inflammation of the larynx, that you can read up easily.
The cough of Chamomilla has some striking things in it. It is a hard cough, a dry, backing cough. The child goes to sleep at night and coughs and does not wake up. Coughs in its sleep, It is a little feverish has taken cold, and one side of the face is flushed.
It is crabbed when it is awake. The child becomes angry when it has a cold and a little cough, and a little disturbance of the larynx and bronchial tubes has been noticed coming on, and all at once it becomes more excitable, wants to be carried, and if not pleased, or is angered, it will go into a hard coughing spell, and cough and vomit.
“Coughing spells from anger.”
That is, he coughs when there is already a cold or a cough, and if the patient becomes angry he has a fit of coughing. The coughing complaints, and chest complaints, and laryngeal complaints are generally worse at night.
The feverish condition comes on at night with the Chamomilla colds, with the Chamomilla whooping cough, with the Chamomilla chest complaints.
Most of the complaints of Chamomilla are better after midnight. From 9 o’clock to midnight they are worse.
“Dry cough worse at night and during sleep.”
Dry cough from catching cold. Rough, scraping cough of children in winter, with tickling in sus sternal fossa, worse at night.
Dry cough, continuing during sleep. Amelioration of cough when getting warm in bed. Chamomilla is a very common remedy in whooping cough, where the child wants to be carried; keeps the nurse busy all the time. Coughs and gags and vomits, and it is very irritable and capricious in all of its wants and coughs during sleep.
You can now easily detect the chest symptoms. They go with the mental symptoms and the irritability and cough. The cough in the chest is scarcely different from the cough in the larynx and the cough from cold.
It is the same Chamomilla cough. Cough during sleep. During most of the complaints, fevers, colds, acute complaints and little attacks, burning of the extremities.
Limbs: Stitching pains in the limbs. Cramping in the muscles. Limbs go to sleep. With the pains in the limbs, and sometimes in other parts, but particularly in the limbs, a benumbed feeling, or pains with the feeling of deadness, pains accompanied by a benumbed feeling; sometimes almost complete loss of sensation of the skin, yet the pains in the long nerves in the extremities are very violent, and the patient seems just as sensitive to pain as at other times.
Extremely sensitive to pain, but the pains themselves cause a benumbing feeling to follow them.
It has been called in Older books a paralyzing pain. Convulsions of the extremities. Convulsions of the whole body.
“Cramps in the legs and calves.
Tearing pains in the feet following a severe chill.
Burning of the soles at night, puts the feet out of bed.”
All the routine prescribers whenever. the patient is known to put the feet out of bed give Sulphur,, yet there is a large list of remedies with hot feet, burning soles, and all of them will put the feet out of bed, of course, to cool them off.
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.