Baryta carbonica


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


Generalities: Baryta carbonica is an interesting study, because it is fully proved and a constitutional remedy. Such remedies are always more interesting than the short-acting, superficial ones. They take hold in deep-seated, long-lasting, miasmatic troubles.

This remedy looks towards the development of the young. You will see in the text commonly expressed under this medicine, “dwarfishness.”

That does not always mean small in stature as it is spoken of in this remedy. Dwarfishness in body and mind; mental dwarfishness, and dwarfishness of organs.

You realize what precocity means; young persons who are unusually brilliant; well advanced mentally. We say they are beyond their years. They are precocious.

Get this in mind first, and think what it means; and then in the Baryta carb. constitution, we have the very opposite state.

That is what we mean by dwarfishness. Children are late coming into usefulness; or activity; late with their studies; late! learning to talk; late learning to read; late learning to make the combinations that enter into life; late learning to take in images, and form perceptions; to take on their activities; to do their work.

Late: We say sometimes that Calc. carb. is late in learning to walk, but Baryta carb. is also late learning to walk, although it has an entirely different cause.

To express it in a common, old-fashioned way, Baryta carb. is late learning how to walk, even with pretty good limbs. Calc. has miserable, weakly limbs, flabby muscles, poor bones, and hence he is late learning to walk.

“Late walking” is Calc.

“Late learning to walk” is Baryta carb.

It competes also with Borax and Natrum mur. All three of these medicines have a peculiar kind of tardiness in the development of the brain, so that they are late learning to do things; late in developing.

But Baryta carb. leads them all in this late coming into the activities and uses of life.

You will have patients to treat, where this slow development manifests itself in girls. 18 to 25 years of age, who do the things they did when they were children, and say things as they said them when they were children.

“Childish manner of doing things, and childish behavior. Playing with dolls and saying foolish things.”

They have not come into womanhood. They are late in taking on the activities and uses of the woman. They lack the prudence of the woman. They have not become circumspect, and say things just as a boy or just as a little girl would say them.

That is the dwarfishness of the mind. To appreciate that late development, and to see it in Baryta carb. from all of its symptoms and peculiar features, leads to a strong grasp of the remedy.

There is some of this found in such remedies as Graph., Sulph. and Calc., but nothing compared to this remedy. This seems to suspend the development that makes the child into a man or a woman.

It is not a small person that makes me think of Baryta carb., but the dwarfishness that is mental, and that is of organs.

Organs, as it were, become paralyzed, or one organ does not develop. It stops, and the others go on. That would make me think of this remedy. A single organ fails to mature, and the others go on; one-sidedness, a partiality of development.

Lymphatic glands: The next grand feature of this remedy is its affinity for the lymphatic glands all over the body. The glands all over the body enlarge and indurate; the glands of the neck, the glands of the groin, the lymphatics in the abdomen are all affected-knotty chains form in the neck.

With a few other things that we will put together shortly we will see in this patient a peculiar figure. It has emaciation-gradual dwindling in persons who have been fat, who have been well nourished.

It has an enlarged abdomen. It has been found suitable in marasmus, for children with enlarged glands, enlarged abdomen; emaciation of the tissues, emaciated limbs and dwarfishness of mind, and you have there all the whole Baryta carb. marasmus.

The patient himself is chilly; sensitive to cold; wants to be well wrapped. Marked weakness with feeble pulse is a strong feature and he must lie down; he is worse standing and sitting.

The weakness is worse after eating. His pains are better from motion and in the open air. His complaints are aggravated by cold. The enlarged glands take on tenderness and congestion from being exposed. The tonsils gradually increase. The glands of the neck increase in size, and in hardness, from every cold and from becoming chilled.

“Swelling and induration of glands. Inflammation of glands with infiltration.”

Infiltration belongs to the remedy. The glands become harder and harder. Ulcers become indurated in their base. Open sur faces become indurated in their walls.

When a child has almost any disease, measles, scarlet fever, mumps, or even a bad cold, or a malarial attack, the development ceases and dwarfishness results, a state in which he was not born, but a state that he has acquired, arrest of development.

It brings on emaciation and dwindling of the whole body, except the abdomen, which gradually enlarges. These are phases not to be overlooked in the very beginning, because the symptoms only help to establish this basis and these troubles and tissue changes come on as ultimates.

Another grand feature in this remedy is the application of these things to more advanced years. We say this is a childhood state, this is the state of youth and arrested development.

Now it does not matter whether we have this arrested development in youth, in childhood, or at the advanced age of fifty. From some strange circumstance which we are not able to fathom we say the individual is taking on the, appearance of old age.

Premature old age: We call it premature old age. Baryta carb. has cured lingering complaints that have resulted from malaria, overwork, mental or physical, prolonged mental strain, when the appearance of premature old age was a prominent feature.

Old age creeps upon him too soon. There is but little difference between childhood and old age, and hence old age is called second childhood; but we always regret to see a man under seventy becoming childish, and yet we do see many becoming simple and childish. It does not mean merely imbecility, but childlike behavior.

Doing and saying things like a child. So in premature old age these symptoms lead us to think of Baryta carb.

Baryta carb. has cured fatty tumors, encysted tumors, lupus, outward growths of tuberculous character, sarcoma; and it has mitigated the pains and sufferings and has prolonged life in cancerous affections.

Mind: Mentally it is worthy of careful study, and we will see cropping out in the mental symptoms all of the phases intermingled with tissue changes.

The Baryta carb. child will be seen hiding behind the furniture when strangers come in; will hide as for shame of something or as if afraid. It imagines all sorts of strange things, that it is talked about, or laughed at.

It does not seem to advance. It does not seem to do any good to teach it, for it does the same things over and over and remains untrained. They either cannot comprehend, or they can not memorize, or they cannot maintain a thought, and you go over it and over it, and the mother wonders if that child is ever going to learn something, and the teacher reports that the child lacks capacity.

The teacher cannot comprehend it, the mother cannot comprehend it, but the homoeopathic physician should know all about it at once. If he knows his Materia Medica he should be well up in the development of a feeble child; those who are going towards rickets, who are feeble, who are always depending on somebody, fitted only for menial places.

The homeopathic physician does well when he trots the little Johnnies and the little Susies on his knee and takes a good fair observation of their ability, and of what they lack, and understands how to build up what is lacking. Is not that in itself worth working for?

It requires all of the potencies that have ever been made to master constitutions. Some will require medium potencies, some very low, some very high. Let us not deprive our little ones of anything they need. Only so we look forward to the highest use, to develop them into their fullest capacity.

There is an expression here in the text,

“Want of clear consciousness.”

Do we not see from what I have said, what that must mean in this remedy, and that it is different in this remedy from what it is in a good many others?

And yet if you had read that symptom first you would not have appreciated it.

“A want of clear consciousness.”

Especially in old age has that been useful. It is not that confusion of mind that we know to be dizziness. But he is not clear in his intellect. We see how this medicine takes hold of the intellect. It takes hold of his memory. It begins with a feeble state, and it gradually travels toward imbecility.

You press it to its extreme and it has imbecility, and up to this we have degrees all along the line from the very beginning, from a mere matter of cloudiness in his thoughts to imbecility.

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.