Kent's - Classical Homeopathy Online

There is a kind of marasmus that you will puzzle over if you do not know this remedy. If weanalyze the remedy in general, we will see that it produces a state of the body like that prior totuberculosis. He does not undergo repair, he loses flesh, and the muscles become flabby as if someserious disease were coming. In children of tuberculous parents there is that tendency to go intomarasmus. The child's muscles are flabby, the child will not thrive in spite of feeding and medicines. Itseems to be laying the foundations for some serious trouble. Finally, it emaciates and the back of thehead begins to sink in, as if from atrophy of the cerebellum. The appetite increases for milk and meatand animal broths, and yet they are not digested, and when the milk is taken it continually passes thebowel in the form of white potter's clay, or like putty. The stool is soft and of the consistency of putty.If you go through a china factory where the men are forming with their hands, in such wonderfulmanner, all sorts of beautiful dishes, and molds, you will see that the original clay, as they aremanipulating it, is white. It is a perfect picture of the Mag. carb. stool, composed of putty-likeundigested milk.I have observed, especially among illegitimate infants, those that have been conceived byclandestine coition, that they have a tendency to sinking in the back of the head. The occipital bone willsink in, and the parietal bones jut out over it, and there will be a depression. That is not an uncommonthing in children that go into marasmus. They are very likely to have a potter's clay stool. It does notrun, and it is not hard. The white, hard stool is quite another symptom, and the soft, semi-fluid whitestool leads to another class of remedies, but this pasty stool, looking as if it could be moulded into anykind of shape, is a Magnesia carb. stool. I once had in charge an orphanage, where we had sixty to onehundred babies on hand all the time. The puzzle of my life was to find remedies for the cases that weregoing into marasmus. A large number of them were clandestine babies It was a sort of Sheltering Armsfor these little ones. The whole year elapsed, and we were losing babies every week from this gradualdecline, until I saw the image of these babies in Magnesia carb., and after that many of them werecured.The Mag. carb. baby . Wash it as you will and it smells sour;the perspiration is sour, and the whole baby smells sour. It is not especially the stool. The stool smellsstrong and pungent, putrid, and very often the whole child has a pungent odor, like an unclean baby,though it be well washed.The produce inactivity of the rectum and anus---a paresis. The stool is large andhard, requiring great straining to expel. It is dry, hard and crumbling. The stool will remain partlyexpelled and then crumble, breaking up in many pieces.Another stool that is laid down in the books as a most striking condition of Magnesia carb. isgreen; it is the diarrhoeic stool, and the green part floats upon the watery portion of the stool.The stool is often lumpy, and liquid. The lumps lie in the bottom of the vessel, but floating uponthe liquid portion of the stool is the green like the scum of the frog pond. This is recognized as one ofthe most striking features. "Stools green, like scum on a frog pond; sour, frothy; with white floatinglumps like tallow, bloody, mucous." Floating like lumps of tallow, is more characteristic of, and many a time has cured it.The face of the chronic adult case is pale, waxy, sickly and sallow, and you wonder why thispatient will not right up, and will not thrive. She has a sickly countenance, , shebecomes so tired and sweats upon little exertion. She is disturbed in every change of the weather, and isworse at the beginning of menstruation. She seems to take cold whenever menstruation is coming on.She says: "I know my menstrual period is coming on, because I have a cold in my head." Magnesiacarb.has coryza every month before the monthly period. These patients take on an appearance as ifgoing into decline, and yet they go on year after year unable to do anything, not able even to keephouse, have a violent craving for meat and an aversion to vegetable food, grow thin and increasinglyflabby, muscles relaxed, and with tendency to prolapsus. The walls of the abdomen have a tendency tofall down and to be relaxed, and the rings favor the formation of hernia. That is the kind of relaxation.The nerves are painful, and the muscles are tired. When you have such a case and haveprescribed, and they persist in spite of every remedy, you know that the case does not well indicate aremedy, that the conditions are latent and there is a tendency to some grave internal disorder. Theorgans are threatening to break down; the kidneys, the heart, the lungs, or the brain are about toundergo organic change.We have a catarrhal state in this remedy, but it is a dry catarrh, not much discharge. An oldulcer will dry up and become shiny and discharge almost nothing. The nose is dry and the eyeballs areso dry that the lid stick together and it is difficult to open the eyes. The skin becomes dry and itches and