In Sepia there is much offensiveness; the odor of the stool is unusual, loose stools horribly offensive, foetid; the sweat is foetid, the urine is foetid.
“The stool has a putrid, sourish, foetid smell, expelled suddenly and the whole of it at once.”
Sepia is given in a routine way for constipation, when there are few symptoms.
Rectum: There is always a sense of fullness in the rectum after stool; ineffectual straining and sweating in the effort because the patient is weak and exhausted.
Sepia has the ineffectual urging like Nux. She may go for days with no urging and then the effort is as if she were in labor. Prolapse of the rectum. Weight as of a ball in the anus not relieved by stool.
Soreness of the anus. Expulsion of ascarides. Oozing moisture from the rectum, soreness between the buttocks.
Hemorrhoids soon form when the rectum is so packed with feces, and they give additional trouble.
Urinary: There is much urinary trouble; involuntary urination as soon as the child goes to sleep at night.
Sepia is compelled to keep the mind on the neck of the bladder or she will lose the urine; urine is lost when coughing, sneezing, laughing, the slam of a door, a shock, or when the mind is diverted.
Frequent, constant urging to urinate with milky urine that burns like fire and after standing a while a milky, grayish deposit will form which is hard to wash off the vessel. Bloody urine scanty and suppressed, great pain in the kidneys and bladder with great bearing down; sudden desire with tenesmus as if the uterus would come out. Sudden desire to urinate with cutting like knives and chill all over the body, if unable to pass it, as a lady in company.
I remember a pitiable case. A saleswoman was obliged to go to the closet every few minutes; a violent pain like a knife cutting came with the desire to urinate, and if the urine was not passed this pain would hold right on. She was compelled to keep her mind on the urine or she would lose it. She was tall, slim, with sallow face, distressed look, worn and tired. Sepia cured her and she was never troubled again.
The Sepia patient aborts at the third month. All sorts of ulcerative conditions, displacements, dragging down and relaxations. Retained Placenta. Sub involution, all the pelvic organs are tired and weak. Metrorrhagia during the climacteric or during pregnancy, especially at the fifth and seventh months.
Genitals: Both male and female have aversion to the opposite sex.
In the female there is a state as if she had indulged to excess, when this is not the case. No endurance, tired after coition, sleepless nights, sleep full of dreams, jerking of muscles, twitching, leucorrhoea, congestion of the pelvis.
A woman who has been normal in her relations with her husband brings forth a child, and then the thought of sexual relations causes nausea and irritability.
The menstrual symptoms are of all sorts, no particular derangement characterizes Sepia. At one time it was thought that scanty menstruation was the more striking feature, but this is not necessarily so; from provings and clinical observations, it has cured profuse as well as scanty flow. Most violent dysmenorrhoea in girls of delicate fiber, sallow girls.
Sepia comes in when the woman ought to menstruate when the child ceases to nurse; sometimes the child dies and menses ought to be established but do not appear, and the mother runs down, pines away; Sepia will establish the flow.
Calcarea is the opposite; the menses come on while the child is nursing. Thick greenish acrid or milky leucorrhea. Leucorrhoea in little girls.
In the male, old sycotic discharge that has resisted injection. Profuse yellow, or milky discharge from the urethra, or the “last drop” painless.
Gonorrhea after the acute symptoms have subsided. Urine loaded with urates, stains everything red and often excoriates, very foetid, associated with prostatitis.
“Gleet; no pain; discharge only during the night, a drop or so staining the linen yellowish; yellowish discharge, no burning or urinating; painless; of a year and a half’s standing; orifice of urethra stuck together in the morning, particularly when the sexual organs are debilitated by long continuance of disease or through frequent seminal emissions.”
Warts on the genitals; Sepia is useful when these organs have been overused and take on such an appearance. Impotence in the male, loss of sexual feeling in the female.
The close relation between this remedy and Murex is worth considering. The muscular relaxation, dragging down in the abdomen and pelvis, aggravated from exertion and walking, ameliorated by sitting with the limbs crossed and ameliorated by pressure on the genitalia would be like both remedies; but add to this copious menstrual flow and violent sexual desire and Murex must be considered and Sepia eliminated.
Both have extreme empty feeling in the stomach. Sepia has diminished sexual desire and often aversion. Murex has great soreness and congestion of the uterus, and she is constantly reminded of the uterus. Murex has acute pain in right side of uterus which crosses the body diagonally upward to left side of chest, or left breast, It cures violent dysmenorrhoea. It has been useful in cancer of the -uterus. Watery, greenish, thick, bloody leucorrhea, causing itching.
Back: One of Sepia’s most general characteristics is the amelioration from violent exercise; worse on beginning to move but better by getting warmed up. This condition is closely related to the back symptoms. There is a great amount of soreness in the back, the spine aches all the way down. Pressure on the spine reveals sore places, spinal irritation.
Aching in the back mostly from the loins to the coccyx, often coming on from sitting, and ameliorated from violent exercise. A peculiar feature is amelioration from hard pressure. The patient commonly puts a book low down on the chair and presses the back against it. Sepia does not seem to get the amelioration from lying upon the back as Natrum mur. does. Stooping aggravates the backache.
”Backache worse from kneeling.”
Under symptoms of the lower extremities we find great numbness of the feet.
“Coldness of the legs and feet especially in the evening in bed when the feet get warm the hands get cold; icy coldness of the feet profuse sweat of the feet or sweat of unbearable odor causing. soreness between the toes. Swelling of the limbs better while walking.”
The sleep is full of dreams and distress; cannot sleep upon the left side because of palpitation of the heart. Palpitation in sleep, with pulsations and trembling all over the body, pulsations to the finger tips.
In old cases of suppressed malaria, Sepia brings back the chill, but its most useful sphere is after a bad selection of the remedy and the case becomes confused. Where a remedy has been selected for only a part of the case and changed it a little but the patient gets no better.
It will be seen that the fever, chill, and sweat are just as erratic as can be. Natrum mur. is one of the greatest malarial remedies, but it is full of order like China, Sepia is full of disorder.
In a case confused by remedies think of Calcarea, Arsenicum, Sulphur, Sepia and Ipecac. Never give China or Natrum mur. for irregular symptoms and stages.
Sepia is complementary to Natrum mur. Aside from the stupid condition of the mind it has an excitable condition of the general nervous system that is often marked in Natrum mur. as, for instance, being disturbed by a noise, the slam of a door, etc. It produces jerking of the muscles in sleep; constantly wakes from imaginary noises, thinks someone has called her; the last disturbance about the house wakens her.
Worse before and during menses; during pregnancy; after eating during first sleep; change of weather; during a thunderstorm; overwhelming fear.
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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