Then we have septicemic conditions, with purulent lochia or suppression of the lochia. You may go to a case in which, on the third day, there has been a chill, the lochia has been suppressed, the woman has a high temperature and is covered from head to foot with sweat. As you put your hand under the covers you feel steam come up from the body so that you want to take your hand away, it is so hot. She is dazed and is sensitive over the whole abdomen.
You know now the meaning of the suppression of the lochia; you have a puerperal fever on hand. Study closely for Sulphur instead of hunting around among Aconite, Bryonia, Belladonna, Opium, etc. With these you will make a total failure in most instances, but Sulphur fits into just such a state and has cured many cases of puerperal fever.
If it is but a milk fever or mammary indisposition and the chill is only acute, then your short-acting remedies will do very well and even Aconite has been useful, but when it is a case of septicemia, Sulphur goes to the very root of it. When the feet burp, when there is a hungry feeling in the stomach, the night aggravation with sinking and exhaustion, and when throughout the body there is a sensation of steam rising or hot flashes, one after another, you must give Sulphur.
Now, on the other hand, if in such a case, with the hot sweat and other general features, you have one rigor following another in rapid succession and no end to them, you cannot get out of that case without Lycopodium, which goes as deeply into the case as Sulphur. When there is a continuous intermingling of little chillinesses and little quiverings throughout the body and the pulse has lost its proper relationship to the temperature, Pyrogen must be administered. If there is a purplish appearance of the body, cold sweat all over, if there are remittent or intermit-tent chills, with thirst during -the chill, and at no other time, and the face is red during the chill, you must give Ferrum, as no other remedy looks just like that.
When one side of the body is hot and the other side is cold and you find the woman in a tearful state, trembling with fear, nervous excitement and restlessness, give Pulsatilla, which also has a septic state and is sufficient to overcome the septic condition.
Sulphur is suitable in surgical fever when it takes this form of flashes of heat and steaming sweat. In these deep-seated septic states, somewhere from beginning to end, Sulphur will most likely be wanted. You may see in the earlier stages of that septic state a number of Bryonia symptoms, but Bryonia cannot take hold of that case. Remember that in a septic state you want to get ahead of it in the first twenty-four hours; you do not want to let it run on, and if Bryonia has only mitigated it in its beginning then it is too late for Sulphur.
Go to Sulphur at once. Now, another thing, even if you have made a mistake in giving Sulphur and you find it does not take hold of the case, it always simplifies it, does good and never spoils it. It gives you a good basis to begin on. It goes to the bottom and simplifies the matter, and, if you have mental and nervous symptoms left still you have overcome that violent septic state which must be met at once, and the remaining symptoms in many instances are simple. Sulphur is a general remedy to begin with in those cases where the symptoms are not perfectly clear for another.
Respiration: This remedy is full of difficult breathing, shortness of breath from very little exertion, copious sweat, so exhausted; asthmatic breathing and much rattling in the chest.
Every time he gets “cold” it settles in the chest or in the nose. In both these instances the catarrhal state hangs on and holds a long time; it seems never to be finished, always remains as a catarrhal state.
“Every cold he takes ends in asthma,” calls for Dulcamara, but very often the fag end of that attack will remain and the physician has to give a deep-acting remedy. After Dulcamara has done all it can do, Sulphur comes in as its complementary remedy. Calcarea carb. has a similar relationship to Dulcamara.
The nose, the inner chest and lungs furnish us localities for much trouble. The patient has had pneumonia and it has gone on to the period of infiltration; you have taken the case in this advanced stage after Bryonia has overcome the threatening features, and now when the patient should rally he does not rally; he perspires all over, is tired and has a strange and singular consciousness that “there is something wrong in there; a load in there;” “difficult breathing; flashes of heat and yet not much fever; sometimes coldness alternating with flashes of heat. I have often heard them say, ”
There is a great load in there, doctor. I cannot get rid of it.”
Upon close examination you find there is hepatization and now comes the time for such remedies as Phosphorus, Lycopodium and Sulphur, and Sulphur leads them all.
When Bryonia has been sufficient for the earlier symptoms, or when Aconite has cleared them up, there has been too much for these remedies to relieve, then hepatization comes on. If this is confined to only a small area it will keep up quite a chronic course, but Sulphur will clear it up. If, however, it is a double pneumonia, or the hepatization involves a considerable portion of the lung, and the remedy given has not been sufficient, and the case is advancing towards a fatal issue, it may be that all at once at one, two or three o’clock in the morning, he begins to sink, his nose becomes pinched, his lips are drawn, he takes on a hippocratic countenance, is covered with cold sweat, be is too feeble in every part of his body to move; he only moves his head a little in a restless manner.
Unless you are called at once and give him a dose of Arsenicum he will die. You give the Arsenicum, and you have done well, but Arsenicum has no ability to remove the results of inflammation. But though it cannot cure that hepatized lung it acts as a vital stimulant; it warms up the patient and makes him feel he is going to get better; but, mark this, in twenty four hours he will die unless you follow the Arsenicum with the proper remedy.
You must not wait on your remedy too long in these cases. Just as soon as he rallies and the reaction is at its highest pitch, give him the antidote and natural follower of Arsenicum, which is Sulphur, and in twenty-four hours the patient will say,
“I am getting better.”
As sure as you exist today, it will do just that thing. There are times when you will see clearly that Phosphorus is the medicine to follow Arsenicum with. If such a patient, rallying under Arsenicum, goes into a fever, if a hot fever comes on with burning thirst and he cannot get enough ice-cold water, you must follow it with Phosphorus, and it will do in that case what Sulphur will do in the other.
You will not see these cases in your own practice because you will not let your cases get into that state; if such cases have power enough to live when prescribed for properly in that state, they have power enough to let you break up the whole nature of the case in the beginning
But go back to that patient who had only a circumscribed hepatization and felt well enough to get up and go around. He has a lingering cough, and now six months or a year after the attack he says.
“Doctor, I have never been right since I had an attack of chest trouble.
The doctor called it pneumonia.”
He can tell you about the rusty sputum and the other little things that belong to pneumonia; that is all you need to know. He has had a chronic cough ever since that attack and now he has chilliness.
There is fibrinous infiltration, not a tuberculous state, but the remains of hepatization that nature could not cure. If that is allowed to go on be will go into catarrhal phthisis, asthmatic conditions of chronic bronchitis and troubles of various sorts, and finally he will die from these. Sulphur will very often conform to all of his symptoms; it especially has the ability to clear up the lungs that were not properly cleared up at the time of his illness.
Sulphur cures bronchitis. It cures asthmatic bronchitis when the symptoms agree. Sulphur has a most violent cough that racks the whole frame; it seems that the head will fly off; pain in the head when coughing; the head is jarred by the cough. Then he has expectoration of blood, bleeding from the lungs; in all of these cases threatening phthisis, when there is yet not too much deposit of tubercle, when there is only the beginning of tubercular deposit.
The low, stricken down constitution, the emaciated subjects that have inherited phthisis who have the all-gone hungry feeling in the stomach, heat on the top of the head and uneasiness from the warmth of the bed.
These cases would be better if they had plenty of eruptions come out upon the body; but as a matter of fact the skin has no eruptions; there is no relief; it is all going on in his internals and he is gradually breaking down.
Sulphur will in such instances rouse that patient out of his phthisical state and he will return to health, or, if be is too bad for that be may be kept for years from his troubles. Look out for it in the advanced state of phthisis. You have had sufficient said concerning its administration in such a condition. It increases the suppuration, and brings on little pneumonias wherever there is a tubercle; it tends to suppurate these out. Every cell that is incapable of carrying on its function will be sloughed out by Sulphur.
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.
Comments are closed.