“Sensitive, even cries when thanked.”
When lying in bed suffering from the lower forms of fevers, there is delirium and even un consciousness. He picks at imaginary things in the air, sees flies and all sorts of little things flying in the air.
“Excessively merry and laughs at simplest things.”
A condition of insanity.
“Despondent.”
The Lycopodium patient wakes up in the morning with sadness. There is sadness and gloom. The world may come to an end, or the whole family may die, or the house may burn up. There seems to be nothing cheering, the future looks black. After moving about a while, this passes off. This state precedes conditions of insanity, and finally a suicidal state comes, an aversion to life.
See how this remedy takes hold of the will and actually destroys man’s will to live. That which is first in man is his desire to be, to exist, and to be something, if ever so small. When that is destroyed, we see what a wonderful thing has been destroyed. The very man himself wills then not to be. It is a perversion of everything that makes the man, the destruction of his will.
“Apprehensiveness, difficult breathing and fearfulness.”
“Anxious thoughts as if about to die.”
“Want of self-confidence, indecision, timidity, resignation.”
“Loss of confidence in himself and in everything.”
“Misanthropic, flies even from his own children.”
“Distrustful, suspicious and fault finding.”
“Oversensitive to pain; patient is beside himself.”
Head: Lycopodium is subject to periodical headaches, and headaches connected with gastric troubles. If he goes beyond his dinner hour a sick headache will come on. He must eat with regularity or he will have the headache which he is subject to. This is somewhat like a Cactus headache.
Cactus has a congestive headache which becomes extremely violent with flushed face if he does not eat at the regular time. One distinguishing feature is that with the Lycopodium headache, if he eats something, the headache is better while the Cactus headache is worse from eating. Lycopodium and especially Phosphorus and Psorinum have headaches with great hunger.
At or about the beginning of the attack there is a faint all-gone hungry feeling which eating does not satisfy. Such is the nature of Phosphorus and Psorinum when the appetite and headache are associated.
The Lycopodium headache is < from heat, from the warmth of the bed, and from lying down, > from cold, from the cold air, and from having the windows open. Lean, emaciated boys are subject to prolonged pains in the head. Every time this little fellow takes cold he has a prolonged, throbbing, congestive headache, and from day to day and from month to month he becomes more emaciated, especially about the face and neck. This same trouble is present when a narrow chested boy has a dry, teasing cough, without expectoration, and emaciates about the neck and face.
This remedy is especially suitable in these withered lads, with a dry cough or prolonged headache. In children who wither after pneumonia or bronchitis, emaciate about the face and neck, take cold on the slightest provocation, suffer with headache from being heated, have nightly headaches, and a state of congestion that affects the mind more or less, in which they rouse out of sleep in confusion.
The little one screams out in sleep, awakes frightened, looks wild, does not know the father and mother, or nurse or family until after a few moments, when he seems to be able to collect his senses and then realizes where he is and lies down to sleep again. In a little while he wakes up again in a fright, looks strange and confused. That repeats itself.
The headaches are throbbing and pressing, as if the head would burst; but this is not so important as the manner in which they come on, the circumstance of their cause, the things that the child does and the fact that they are better from cold, worse from noise and talking, worse from 4 to 8 P.M., and he emaciates from above downward.
These are more important than the quality of the pain that the patient feels, but if he describes the quality of the pain it is spoken of as a throbbing, pressing, bursting or as a fullness.
Upon the scalp we find eruptions in patches, smooth patches with the hair off. Patches on the face and eczematous eruptions behind the ears, bleeding and oozing a watery fluid, sometimes yellowish watery.
The eczema spreads from behind the ears up over the ears and to the scalp. Lycopodium is a very important remedy to study in eczema of the infant.
Eczema in a lean, hungry, withering child with more or, less head trouble, such as has been described, with a moist oozing behind the cars, red sand in the urine, face looking wrinkled, a dry teasing cough, in a child that kicks the covers of a child whose left foot is cold and the other warm, with capricious appetite, eating much, with unusual hunger at times and great thirst, and yet losing steadily, will often be cured by Lycopodium
It will throw out a greater amount of eruption at first, but this will subside finally and the child will return to health. The head in general is closely related to one symptom, viz., red sand in the urine. A long as the red sand is plentiful, the patient is free from these congestive headaches, but when the urine becomes pale and free from the red pepper deposit; then comes the bursting, pressing headache, lasting for days.
It might be said that this is a uraemic headache; but it does not matter what you call it, if the symptoms are present the remedy will be justified. In old gouty constitutions, when the headache is most marked, the gout in the extremities will be > and vice versa.
The headaches is present only in the absence of pain in the extremities. Again, when there is a copious quantity of red sand in the urine the gouty state, either in the head or extremities, will be absent, but whenever he takes cold the secretion seems to slacken up with an < of the pain.
There is another feature of the Lycopodium headache related to catarrhal states. The headache is < when the catarrh is slacked up by an acute cold. The Lycopodium subject often suffers from thick, yellow discharge from the nose.
The nose is filled with yellow, green crusts, blown out of the nose in the morning and hawked out of the throat. Now, when the patient takes cold the thick discharge to a great extent ceases, and he commences to sneeze and has a watery discharge. Then comes on a Lycopodium headache, with great suffering, with pressing pains, with hunger, and finally the coryza passes away, and the thick yellow discharge returns and the headache subsides.
We have many eye symptoms in Lycopodium, but most prominent are the catarrhal affections of the eyes. The symptoms are so numerous, they describe almost any catarrhal condition of the eyes, so that you cannot discriminate upon the eye symptoms alone. Inflammatory conditions with copious discharge, with red eyes, ulceration of the conjunctiva and lids, and granular lids.
Ears: For the ears Lycopodium becomes an important remedy, because this selfsame emaciating child, with the wrinkled countenance and dry cough, has had, since an attack of scarlet fever, a discharge from the ears, thick, yellow and offensive, with loss of hearing.
If the suitable remedy be given in a case of scarlet fever, there will be no ear trouble left, because ear troubles do not necessarily belong to scarlet fever. They are not a part of scarlet fever, but are dependent on the constitutional state of the child. Lycopodium has also most painful eruptions of the ears, otitis media, abscess in the ear, associated with eczema about the cars and behind the ears.
Nose: The nose symptoms I have only partly described in association with the head.
The trouble often begins in infancy. The little infant will lie at first with a peculiar rattling breathing through the nose, and finally it will breathe only through the mouth, as the nose is obstructed. This goes on for days and months. The child breathes only through the mouth, and when it cries it has the shrill tone, such as is found when the nose is plugged up. If you look you will see the nose is filled up with a purulent matter and hanging down the throat is a muco-purulent discharge. Much stuffing up of the nose is a chronic state of Lycopodium.
The child will go on with this trouble until it forms into great cruse, yellow, sometimes blackish, sometimes greenish, and the nose bleeds. It is most useful in those troublesome catarrhs associated with headaches; in such patients as lose flesh about the neck. It may seem strange and unaccountable that Lycopodium can cause emaciation about the neck and shriveling of the face when the lower limbs are in a very good state of preservation. In old chronic catarrhs of adults they must keep continually blowing the nose.
He cannot breathe through the nose at night, as crusts form in all portions of the mucous membranes. Crusty nostrils with eczema, with oozing eruptions about the face and nose. The mucous discharge is almost as thick and tenacious as in Kalium bichromicum.
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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