It takes a long time for this remedy, in the proving, to develop its symptoms. It is a very deep-acting medicine, and an antipsoric, antisyphilitic and anti-sycotic.
It is insidious in its action and its symptoms are slow in approach; it is like the deepest and slowest and most tedious diseases, the miasms, and hence it is suitable in the very slowest and lowest forms of disease.
While it has in its nature some febrile action, it is not for this purpose that it is oftenest called for its most typical febrile action is very slow and insidious. It corresponds to overheated states of the system, old cases of nightly fevers, coming on week after week and year after year.
It is an unusually hot-blooded remedy at times, and again it has conditions of coldness. In the evening and night great heat seems to evolve from the body without increase of temperature. The skin becomes very hot.
That patient is often < from warm things, < from covering, < from warm air; suffocates somewhat like Pulsatilla in a warm room. He wants to bathe the face and head in cold water; such bathing is grateful.
The feet burn and are put out of bed in the night; he hunts around in bed for a cool place for the feet and bands. The soles perspire, and the palms perspire, and the sweat is acrid, making the parts sore; excoriation from the sweat between the toes.
The perspiration is offensive; offensive, acrid sweat between the toes. Burning, unusual heat and acridity are words that modify a great many symptom s; an acrid lachrymation or other discharge from the eye; acrid discharge from the nose, acrid sweat, etc.
Sensation of burning and burning pains in parts; heat evolved from the body as a chronic state. Aggravation from heat, from outward heat and from inward heat, belongs to this remedy. It is a strong feature, of this remedy to be worse from drinking tea and coffee. Warm, drinks bring on a diarrhea, or flatulence, or disturbance in the stomach, and cause indigestion to manifest itself in various way The symptoms are worse standing and sitting and better in the open air.
It is a remedy of great depth of action. It so disturbs the functions that there are peculiar outward signs in the nails, in the hair, in the skin; they are all imperfectly developed.
Skin: Whenever such is the case, we know that a remedy has great depth of action and that it is very long acting. It forms like incrustations here and there upon the skin that seem to have no tendency to heal.
A crust forms, but there seems to be no healing beneath the crust. The hair loses its luster; it falls out, and if examined closely under the microscope it is seen to be necrosed; little ragged ulcers will be found along the course of the hair.
The ends of the hair are dry, the hair mats and splits and breaks, becomes ragged in masses and lustreless. The nails are crippled, likewise corrugations in the nails; the nails grow too fast and grow awkwardly; that is, they are deformed and crippled, too thick in some places, and too thin in others; break easily, brittle.
There is a tendency to breaking down of a slow character, where the circulation is very feeble and the skin is near bone or cartilage as in the cartilages in the ears, and in the cartilages of joints.
Ulcers develop over the tibia. There is feeble circulation in the hands and feet and they become cold. In the evening the extremities burn and are feverish, because that is the time of the feverish state; but in the morning and in the daytime there is coldness of the extremities.
The patient is pallid and sickly, and at times becomes waxy and dropsical; oedema of the extremities, and particularly of the lower extremities; oedema of certain parts; oedema of the prepuce.
When a debilitated subject, one suffering from bone and cartilaginous troubles, contracts gonorrhoea, with it he will have enormous swelling of the prepuce, and nothing seems to act upon it. Fluoric acid will cure oedema of the prepuce with gonorrhoea in such a subject. Cannabis sativa has the same symptom, but it is especially useful in robust cases.
Fluoric acid will prevent the manifestation of disease in sycotic subjects, will prevent formation of fig warts. It cures fig warts. It produces hardened, dry warts, and dry crusts upon the skin, and crusts not unlike rupia. It is useful in syphilitic rupia.
Bone affections stand out prominently. Necrosis, especially of the long bones, but also of the bones of the ear. It creates an offensive acrid discharge from the ear. It establishes an offensive oezena, an acrid discharge, with necrosis of the nasal bones.
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.
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