Ignatia


James Tyler Kent describes the symptoms of the homeopathic medicine Ignatia in great detail and compares it with other homeopathy remedies….


Ignatia is frequently required and is especially suited to sensitive, delicate women and children; to hysterical women. You will not cure the natural hysterics with Ignatia, but you will cure those gentle, sensitive, fine fibred, refined, highly educated, overwrought women in their nervous complaints with Ignatia when they take on complaints that are similar to such symptoms as come in hysteria.

Hysterical diathesis: The hysterical diathesis is one that is very singular and difficult to comprehend.

But a woman, when overwrought and overexcited and emotional, will do things that she herself cannot account for. She will do things as if she were crazy in her excitement. Will do things she regrets, while the hysteric is always glad of it. No matter how much foolishness there is in it she has only made an exhibition that she is proud of. But our efforts go out for those who imitate them unconsciously. Those who will to do well.

A woman has undergone a controversy at home. She has been disturbed, is excited, and goes into cramps, trembles and quivers. Goes to bed with a headache. Is sick. Ignatia will be her remedy. When she has great distress; unrequited affections. A sensitive, nervous young girl finds out that she has misplaced her affections; the young man has disappointed her; she has a weeping spell, headache, trembles, is nervous, sleepless; Ignatia will make her philosophical and sensible.

A woman loses her child, or her husband. A sensitive, delicate woman, and she suffers from this grief. She has headaches, trembles, is excited, weeps, is sleepless; unable to control herself. In spite of her best endeavors, her grief has simply torn her to pieces. She is unable to control her emotions and her excitement.

Ignatia will quiet her and tide her over the present moment. In all of these instances where all of these conditions brought on from such troubles keep coming back, where your patient dwells upon them, dwells upon the cause, and the state keeps recurring, Natrum mur. will finish up the case.

It will nerve her up and help her to bear her sufferings. Especially useful in constitutions that have been over wrought at school, in science, music, art. Of course, it is natural for very sensitive girls to go into the arts, such as music, painting, etc.

A daughter comes back from Paris after a number of years close application to her music. She is unable to do anything. She flies all to pieces. Every noise disturbs her. She cannot sleep nights. Excitable, sleepless, trembles, jerks, cramps in the muscles; weeps from excitement, and from every disturbing word. Ignatia will tone her up wonderfully.

Sometimes it will complete the whole case. But especially in these oversensitive girls is Natrum mur. very commonly the chronic. It is the natural chronic of Ignatia. When the troubles keep coming back, and Ignatia comes to a place when it will not hold any longer.

Another place where Ignatia and Natrum mur. run close together. A sensitive, overtired girl, after she has been working in music, and in art, and in school, and has tired herself out, is unable to control her affections. Her affections rest on some one whom she would despise. That may be a singular thing, one may not be able to understand it.

A sensitive girl, though she would not let anyone but her mother know of it, falls in love with a married man. She lies awake nights, sobs. She says,

“Mother, why do I do that, I cannot keep that man out of my mind.”

At other times a man entirely out of her station, that she is too sensible to have anything to do with, she just thinks about him. Ignatia, if it is very recent, will balance up that girl’s, mind. If not, Natrum mur. comes in as a follower. We do not know half as much about the human mind as we think we do. We only know its manifestations.

These little things belong to this sphere of the action of this medicine. The one who knows the Materia Medica applies it in its breadth and its length, and sees in it that which is similar.

Ignatia has quivering in the limbs. Nervous, tremulous excitement.

“Weakness of the body coming on suddenly.

Hysterical debility and fainting fits.

Fainting in a crowd.”

It is especially useful in the tearful, nervous, sad, yielding, sensitive minds.

“Jerking and twitching.

Convulsive twitchings.”

Children are convulsed in sleep after punishment.

“Convulsions in children in the first period of dentition.

Spasms in children from fright.”

The child is cold and pale, and has a fixed staring look, like Cina.

“Convulsions with loss of consciousness.

Violent convulsions.

Tetanic convulsions.

Tetanus after fright.

Emotional chorea.

After fright, or grief.”

Choreic girls. Emotional epilepsy, or epileptiform manifestations. Paralytic weakness.

“Great mental emotion.”

Nursing; night watching. A loss of one arm with as perfect paralysis as if it had come from a cerebral haemorrhage. In a few hours this passes off, and the arm is as well as ever. That is a hysterical paralysis.

“Numbness of one or the other arm.

Tingling and prickling in the arm.”

Ignatia is full of surprises. If you are well acquainted with sickness, well acquainted with pathological conditions and that manifestations, you are then able to say whether you should or should not be surprised. You are then able to say what is natural, what is common to sickness. In Ignatia you find what is unnatural, and what is unexpected.

You see an inflamed joint, or an inflamed part where there is heat, redness, throbbing, and weakness; you will handle it with great care for fear it will be painful. Ordinarily you have a perfect right to expect it would be painful. But you find it is not painful, and sometimes ameliorated by hard pressure. Is not that a surprise?

You look into the throat. It is tumid, inflamed, red; the patient complains of a sore throat and pain. Naturally you will not touch it with your tongue depressor for fear it will hurt.

You have every reason to suppose that the swallowing of solids will be painful. But you ask the patient when the pain is present, and the patient will say:

“When I am not swallowing anything solid.”

The pain is ameliorated by swallowing anything solid, by the pressure. It pains all other times. Mentally, the patient does the most unaccountable and most unexpected things. Seems to have no rule to work by, no philosophy, no soundness of mind, and no judgment. The opposite of what would be expected, then, will be found.

The patient is better lying on the painful side. Instead of increasing the pain, it relieves the pain.

“Pain like a nail sticking into the side of the head.”

The only comfort that is felt is by lying upon it, or pressing upon it, and that makes it go away.

Stomach: The stomach is just as strange in its indigestion. Some day or other you will have a queer patient, vomiting everything taken into the stomach, and you will have her try gentle food, a little toast, and the simplest possible things, because she has been vomiting for days and people begin to worry about it for fear she will starve to death.

You try this, and you try that, and she can keep nothing down. Finally she says,

“It I could only have some cole slaw and some chopped onions, I think I could get along all right.”

It is a hysterical stomach, and the patient eats some raw cabbage and some chopped onions, and from that time on she is well.

Those strange things that are ordinarily hard to digest ameliorate the nausea rather than increase it. While milk and toast, and delicate things, and warm things, such as are usually taken, disturb the stomach and increase the nausea. Cold food is craved, and cold food will be digested when warm food will be disturbing and create indigestion.

Cough: The cough has similar features in it. An irritation will come in the throat, as a rule, that is why people cough.

People cough from smarting in the larynx and trachea, from irritation, from tickling, and from a sensation of fullness or a desire to expel something, and this is better by coughing.

But when the irritation in the larynx and trachea comes in the Ignatia patient you have the unexpected again; because the more she coughs the more the irritation to cough is observed, until the irritation is so great and the cough is so great that she goes into spasms. It has been known of an Ignatia patient, that the more she coughed the greater the irritation to cough, and she was drenched with sweat, sitting up in bed with her night-clothes drenched, gagging and coughing and retching, covered with sweat and exhausted.

When you are called to the bedside of such a patient, don’t wait. You cannot get her to stop coughing long enough to say anything to you about it, only you will see the cough has grown more violent; Ignatia stops it at once. Without any provocation whatever a spasmodic condition will come on in the larynx.

Any little disturbance, a mental disturbance, a fright, or distress, or a grievance, will bring a young, sensitive woman home and to her bed, and she will go on with a spasm of the larynx. It is a laryngismus stridulus that can be heard all over the house. Ignatia stops it at once (Gelsemium, Moschus).

James Tyler Kent
James Tyler Kent (1849–1916) was an American physician. Prior to his involvement with homeopathy, Kent had practiced conventional medicine in St. Louis, Missouri. He discovered and "converted" to homeopathy as a result of his wife's recovery from a serious ailment using homeopathic methods.
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.