It has another symptom that was verified by Lippe:
Copious clear, colorless urine, light in specific gravity and from its being light or deficient of salts in the urine we have an aggravation of the gouty manifestations.
Remember that the rheumatic tendency spreads upwards from the lower extremities, from the circumference to the centre.
“Menstruation too early, too profuse, bright red; absence of vital heat.”
Genitals: Great coldness of the body at this time, yet the patient wants the cold air. Copious menstrual flow. Old gouty subjects, with mottled face with the puffiness that is not oedema, simply a venous stasis, with copious menstrual flow, with great pain during menstruation.
The uterus is extremely sensitive to touch, and the pelvic organs are. so sensitive that any deep touch becomes painful to the patient. Dysmenorrhoea in gouty subjects. It turns the constitution into order and prevents the after formation of gout. When such cases are very deep-seated, the uterine troubles will be cured in middle life, and the gouty appearance will come separately. The better the internal is, in an incurable disease, the worse the external becomes, and, when this is so the external trouble is essential to health, and so long as the external manifestations are in the extremities, and the joints are being increasingly affected, so long the internal is in a state of order.
When the remedy works in that way, do not change it and try to get something that will drive the external away. So long as the patient is improving and the external is growing worse, that is the right direction. Ledum acts in this direction. Its tendency is to make the complaints go away from the centre, for its complaints begin in the circumference and go towards the centre. It is sometimes impossible to manage a gouty patient without giving him some sort of explanation.
Lycopodium also keeps conditions coming to the surface. It will send them back to their own place in the externals when they have a tendency to go in. Lycopodium often causes a return of the red sand in the urine.
“Emaciation of suffering parts.”
A nerve is injured by a puncture and a slight infection takes place, so that the wound becomes congested, with a mottled, oedematous appearance, and the part becomes cold, just such a condition as Ledum will cure. The nerve that supplies that part takes on an ascending neuritis, pains shoot along the nerve, the muscles that are supplied by that nerve dwindle and the part withers. We have in Pulsatilla a similar state.
“The diseased limb withers.”
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.