Those cases of diphtheria that ooze blood from the nose and mouth are very low types, and are sure to die without a well-selected remedy. The throat will be filled up under such circumstances with a diphtheritic membrane that looks dark. There is bleeding all around it. Sore mouth with bleeding. Ulcers in the mouth. Ulcers after Mercurius in, those who are pouring forth saliva on the pillow at night. Bleeding ulcers in the mouth. Difficult swallowing. Malignant diphtheria.
Cannot lie on the right side or back without instantly producing black, bilious vomiting. This is a wonderfully bilious remedy, sick headaches, vomiting of bile in great quantities.
The various low forms of disease calling for Crot. often, begin with vomiting great quantities of bile, sometimes bile mixed with blood.
Stomach: Pain in the stomach; coldness as if a piece of ice were in the stomach or in the abdomen. Stomach irritable, unable to retain anything, constantly throws up blood.
Crot. has cured ulceration of the stomach. It has greatly restrained the growth of carcinoma when there is much vomiting of bile and blood. Vomiting in many instances where the blood has no tendency to coagulate.
Now, with all these ulcerations of the stomach, cancerous affections, low zymotic disease, jaundice is nearly always present; jaundice and more or less of bleeding; fever seldom runs high; sometimes the temperature is subnormal, but with oozing and bleedings, with dark hemorrhage from the nose and mouth and dark, scanty, bloody urine containing albumen.
Abdomen: The abdomen is greatly distended like the tympanitic abdomen of typhoid and the low zymotic diseases. Ulceration of the bowels, hemorrhage from the bowels. Much pain and soreness in the abdomen with numbness.
Feeling in it as if it were made of wood.
“Stool black, thin, like coffee grounds.
Dysentery of septic origin from foul water, food, etc.
Diarrhoea from noxious effluvia.”
Inflammation of the ovaries and of the uterus. Low form of putrid fever.
Women: Hemorrhages, Either dark clots or blood that has no tendency to coagulate and keeps on flowing. There is great trouble at the climacteric period. Hot flashes. Jaundice. Hemorrhage from the uterus or from other parts.
Cancer of the uterus with much bleeding. Great offensiveness. Patient becomes yellow, jaundiced, great exhaustion, mottled appearance of the skin, swelling of the face, of the leg, especially along the course of the veins. Phlegmasia alba dolens. Worse from the slightest touch. Worse from jar, from motion.
There is some reason to think that this will be more or less a heart remedy from the great cardiac weakness it produces. But the other snake poisons like Naja, Lachesis and Elaps have had more clinical application than this one.
This one seems to prostrate the heart, but also to prostrate the whole body, and its complaints are more general. Mottled appearance of the limbs. Gangrenous appearance of the extremities.
Skin: Boils, carbuncles and eruptions are surrounded by a purplish condition of the skin, a mottled, blue, splotched or marbled state. It produces boils, abscesses and a condition somewhat resembling a carbuncle, with burning and violent pains, but the peculiar feature is the doughy centre.
Around the boil or carbuncle for many inches there is oedema, with pitting upon pressure. The boil, or abscess, or carbuncle will bleed a thick, black blood that will not coagulate. Carbuncles that come upon the neck and upon the back begin with a pustule, and then several come and they are surrounded by little pustules and papules and there is pitting upon pressure.
For these carbuncles you will need to study particularly Arsenicum, Anthracinum, Lachesis, Secale and Crot.. They are the medicines that have in their nature malignancy and manifestation.
In puerperal fever there is a continued oozing of black offensive blood that will not coagulate; bleeding from every orifice of the body as well as from the uterus. Imagine a woman who is pregnant suffering from typhoid fever.
She aborts and a low zymotic state comes on with the symptoms that I have described and with all the appearances as if she would bleed to death after the abortion. The blood will not coagulate and the flow continues. Or in a woman during a typhoid fever menstruation comes on. It is not a true menstrual flow, that is, it does not resemble the ordinary flow, because it is copious, dark and liquid, a continuous oozing with all the grave symptoms described, and especially the besotted countenance, the comatose state, the appearance as if she were intoxicated, lying as one dead. When aroused every muscle trembles; if the tongue is protruded it trembles, and there is inability to articulate.
Crot. may save her life. Would it be possible to think of graver states of sickness than such as are produced by the ophidia?
When a physician sees these symptoms coming on he immediately thinks of a class of remedies that can cover such a state, remedies like Baptisia, Arsenicum, Secale and the Ophidia, and sometimes Arnica, Phosphorus and Pyrogen.
Sleep: In the more chronic conditions the individual manifests a terrible state as to his sleep. He rises from sleep as in a fright; has horrible dreams of murder, of death, of dead bodies and dead people, of associating with the dead and with corpses, of being in graveyards; even the smell of the cadaver is dreamed of.
While he is awake he is tired, he is stupid, he cannot add figures, he makes mistakes in writing, he transposes sentences, and in words he transposes letters. He is unable to take care of his own accounts, for he cannot add up things that are at all particular. Sleep alternates with long and tedious periods of wakefulness.
He is disturbed by any change to warm weather. Great irritability, sensitive to spheres, easily disturbed by his surroundings, and easily wrought up into a pitch of excitement are also features of this remedy.
Following this up he is suspicious of his friends and is unable to reason upon a rational basis. He craves intoxicating drinks and is unable to resist the craving. This wonderful resemblance to old inebriates has led to the use of Crot. in delirium tremens; it has the besotted countenance, the purple aspect of the face, the peculiar kind of hunger in the drunkard, the craving by spells for stimulants.
There is every reason to believe that in fat, robust, besotted drunkards it may, if properly used, be a remedy deep enough to remove the appetite for strong drink.
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.