ANTIMONIUM CRUDUM [Ant-c]:

- M.L.Tyler.

Stibium Sulphuratum nigrum.

Introduction:
HAHNEMANN says it is found in nature, in the shape of black parallel needles, having a metallic lustre; is composed of twenty-eight parts of sulphur and one hundred parts of antimony. The different triturations are prepared according to the method which has been already pointed out. The smallest dose, he says, is sufficient to produce the desired effect, in chronic diseases. He says:-- Antimony is useful when the following symptoms are indicated: A child cannot bear to be touched or looked at. Rush of blood to the head; troublesome itching on head: with falling off of hair. Redness and inflammation of the eyelids. Sore nostrils: heat and itching of cheek. Pain in hollow teeth. Chronic loss of appetite: eructations tasting of ingesta. Nausea, loathing, disposition to vomit consequent upon a spoiled stomach, etc., etc. One has, perhaps unfortunately, a certain limited number of remedies that have become such friends that they are always at hand, tendering their services; while a host of others remain mere names and need to be laboriously looked up. Ant. crud. has, with us, remained more or less in the latter category. Indeed, one's ideas of the Ant. crud. personality resolve themselves into this:--Greedy, fat, sentimental, with sore corners to mouth, and crippled feet. But the drug ought to be considered in cases of "rheumatic inflammation of muscles. In arthritic affections, with swelling and nodosities. In rheumatic contraction of muscles, with curvature of limbs: (JAHR). Then, together with its sentimentality, it has the irresistible desire to talk in rhymes, or to repeat verses: and with its "ecstatic love", it is said to be useful for the bad effects of disappointed affections (Nat. mur., Calc. phos.). Allen's Keynotes tell us that its symptoms change locality, or go from one side of the body to the other. (Compare Lach., from left to right: Lyc., from right to left: or Lac. can. when they cross and then go back. One has verified this in the diphtheria of a Lyc. case: and (again curatively) with Lac. can. in ovarian pain.).
BLACK LETTER SYMPTOMS
Allen, Hering; also Hahnemann's stressed symptoms in his Chronic Diseases, where no black type is give. Peevish. Sulky. Loathing of life. Child fretful and peevish, turns away and cries when touched. HEADACHE: after bathing; from deranging stomach; alcoholic drinks; after a chill; suppressed eruptions; from a cold. EYES: soreness of outer canthi. Redness and inflammation of eyelids. Chronic blepharophthalmia of children. Sore, cracked and crusty NOSTRILS. Suppurating and long lasting eruption on CHEEKS. Toothache, in hollow TEETH: pain sometimes penetrates into head. Worse at night, after eating and from cold water: touching tooth with tongue causes pain as if nerve were torn: better walking in open air. Gnawing pain in carious teeth; after every meal. TONGUE coated; thick white; milky white, yellow. White tongue. Lips dry. Cracks in the corners of mouth, painful like sores. Gums detach from teeth and bleed easily. STOMACH: violent thirst, with dryness of lips. Thirst in the evening with desire to drink. Gulping up of food, tasting of the ingesta. Vomiting after sour urine. After vinegar or acid wine, loose stools. Constant discharge of wind, up and down, immediately reproduced, for years; (cured case). Belching with taste of what has been eaten. Loathing, nausea and desire to vomit. Gastric symptoms predominate: disgust for drink and food, bitter mouth and vomit. Vomiting. Stomach weak. Easily disturbed digestion. Gastric catarrh: white tongue: nausea and vomiting. Very liquid STOOLS. Diarrhoea: watery with undigested food: watery with little hard lumps. Worse from vinegar--acids--sour wine; overheating ; after cold bathing; at night and early morning. Diarrhoea of old people. Alternate diarrhoea and constipation of old people. Difficult, hard stool: faeces too large. Elderly people with diarrhoea, all at once get costive. Mucous piles, pricking, burning; continuous mucous discharge, staining yellow. Sometimes ichor oozes out. COUGH: first attack is always most severe, subsequent ones weaker and weaker; (whooping cough). Pain in chest with heat. Blenorrhoea pulmonum, or phthisis mucosa. Severe continual itching on chest the whole day. Violent itching on BACK. Arthritic pain in FINGERS. Drawing pains in fingers and their joints. Drawing pain in the left hip-joint. Large horny places on soles, close to toes. Great sensitiveness of soles when walking. Great SLEEPINESS during the day, mostly forenoon. Exhausted in warm weather. Cannot bear HEAT of sun. Worse overheating near the fire. After overheating, diarrhoea. Sensitive to COLD: to inhaling cold air: after taking cold. Pertussis, worse cold washing. Cold bathing: causes violent headache: cold in head; gastric catarrh; diarrhoea; suppressed menses. FEVER: heat attended by sweat. Violent chill without thirst; heat with thirst followed by sweat. After the sweat is over, heat and thirst return. Gastric fevers. Mucous membranes generally affected. Horny excrescences. Measles-like eruptions: or measles delayed: vomiting during measles.
ITALIC, OR NOTABLE, OR QUEER SYMPTOMS
Decided disposition to shoot himself, to no other kind of suicide. This forced him to leave his bed, otherwise he was unable to get rid of it. Continual condition of ideal love and ecstatic longing for some ideal being, which filled his fancy; more when walking in the pure open air than when in a room. Irritated state of mind: feeling of grief. The sound of bells, or the sight of that which surrounds him, moves him to tears. Feeling of emptiness in the head, or headache as if forehead would burst: felt intoxicated. Small, flat, tender tubercles on scalp, with crawling sensation. Roaring in ears. Violent din in ears, as if someone were beating against the door of the house. A kind of deafness in right ear, as if a leaflet were placed before the tympanum. Coryza with sore crusty nostrils. Both nostrils chapped and covered with crusts. Nosebleed. Nose painful, as from inspiring cold air or acrid vapours. Cracks in corners of mouth, painful like sores. Burning, stinging, as from a red-hot spark on chin and upper lip. On touching it, hand seems to move over sore places. Dryness of mouth: rawness of palate. Much saltish saliva in mouth. Violent thirst with dryness of lips. Hiccough. Nausea with vertigo. Violent vomiting, with attacks of anxiety. Terrible vomiting which nothing can stop. Fearful vomiting with convulsions. Violent vomiting and diarrhoea, with excessive anguish. Pain in stomach, as from excessive fullness, without fullness. Pain in stomach as after too much eating, with distended, but not hard, abdomen. Burning at pit of stomach like heartburn, with good appetite. Burning, spasmodic pain, pit of stomach, drove him to despair, and to the resolution of drowning himself. Lord rumbling in abdomen, which is much distended. Protrusion of rectum during stool. Expulsion of black blood. Stool first natural, then several small loose evacuations, then a small but hard evacuation with violent straining. Violent spasms in larynx and pharynx, as if throat were filled with a plug, which becomes alternately thicker and thinner, with a feeling of soreness. Suffocating catarrh. (Death from suffocating catarrh, from a few grains of antimony.) Feeling as if limbs were enlarged. Finger-nails did not grow as formerly: painfully sensitive beneath the nails. Bluish spots on thighs. Bluish spots on tibiae. Mortification of foot: it is quite black. Intolerable burning, lancinating pain in a mortifying foot, it being insensible to touch or the prick of a pin. Her foot so heavy she cannot lift it. Icy cold feet. Large horny places on skin of soles of feet, with pain like corns which returned after having been cut out. Great sensitiveness of soles of feet. Immense swelling of whole body. Dropsical swelling of body. Getting fat: or, Emaciation had exhaustion. Apoplexy with such a profuse flow of saliva, that he expelled a large quantity of watery foam from nose and mouth. Great sleepiness by day. At 7 p.m. overwhelmed with sleep. NASH draws attention to the thick milky-white coating on the tongue which may occur in many complaints. To the derangements from overloading the stomach, especially with fat food : nausea. To the crushed finger-nails, which grow in splits like warts and with horny spots: To the corns and callosities on soles, with excessive tenderness, so that he can only walk with pain and suffering: To the alternate constipation and diarrhoea in old people, especially with the characteristic (white) tongue. Child cannot bear to be touched or looked at: fretful, cross. He says many remedies have white tongue, but this one leads them all: thickly coated, white, white as milk tongue. (We have once seen a tongue not coated, but quite white. So far as memory serves, it was Ant. crud. that quickly cured.) It is a great stomach remedy disorders that arise from overeating gastric derangements of recent date. The sufferer feels he must throw up before there will be any relief. A few pellets of Ant. crud. on the tongue will often settle the business, save the loss of a meal and all further suffering. Then the peculiar stools, partly solid and partly fluid. And the form of diarrhoea oftenest with old people which alternates with constipation, where Antimonium crud. is the only remedy. The peculiar mental symptoms--the greatest sadness and woeful mood: the sentimental mood in the moonlight; ecstatic love. "Child cannot bear to be touched or looked at--a gem!" Nash says that often in cases of gastric or remittent fever he has been led to the use of Ant. crud. by this condition of the mind. The cross child, not like Cham. which wants to be carried and soothed, but which will scream and cry and show temper at every little attention. Here the fever is apt to run higher at night, and the white tongue is almost always present. He notices the finger-nails growing in splits, with horny spots: and the toe-nails that grow out of shape, or shrivel up and do not grow at all. And the very tender corns and callosities. (Here one remembers a case cured by Ant. crud.) He says some of the worst cases of chronic rheumatism have been cured by Ant. crud., guided by the extreme tenderness of the soles of the feet. Horny excrescences anywhere on the skin make one think of Ant. crud. This remedy is most often needed in the extremes of life, in children and old people. He draws attention to its aggravations from heat of sun: also from radiate heat of fire; and also to its aggravations from cold bathing. He says that, when a case of long standing comes, dating the beginning of the trouble from swimming or falling into the water, we think of Ant. crud., and examine for further indications. (N. B.--Burnett's great remedy here was Bellis per.) HUGHES, Pharmacodynamics, gives a very brief account of this drug: but he quotes Dr. Clotar Muller in regard to its extraordinary efficacy in affections of the skin: "I have reason to think that Antimonium crudum is an invaluable remedy where pimples, pustules, pocks or furuncular elevations arise primarily or secondarily, especially when at the same time there is severe continued pricking itching of the skin, and after rubbing tenderness and soreness. Especially when such phenomena occur on the face or genitals. In regard to its "horny places on the skin of the soles of the feet", he quotes a recorded case where one of twenty years standing involving the entire sole, and very sensitive, was soon cured by the drug. KENT points out that all the symptoms seem to centre about the stomach. No matter what the complaint, the stomach takes part in it. It produces a very serious state of mind, and absence of the desire to live. "When I hear a patient say, `Oh, doctor, if I could only die!' I do not like such a case." The prostration is similar to Arsenicum, but Ars. has overwhelming fear of death, while this medicine has loathing of life. These over-excitable, intense, nervous, hysterical young girls and women are overcome by mellow lights such as flow through stained glass windows, or by the mellow light from the moon in the evening: that is what is meant by "Sentimental mood in the moonlight". Worse cold, damp weather: cold bathing. Yet many of the symptoms come on in the sun's rays, and from the heat of an open grate. A child with whooping cough will cough more after looking into the fire. Constant nausea: stomach feels too full, as if he had eaten too much, when he has not eaten at all: feels distended when the abdomen is flat. Gouty persons where the nodules on fingers and joints become painless and the stomach and intestines become distended and painful. Skin ulcerated: a tendency to grow warts, callosities, bad nails and bad hair. The thickened skin on soles of feet are very sore to walk upon, because of their numerous centres of little corns. Warts on hands: nails brittle, black, can hardly be cut. P. S.--Dr. Schwartz of California writes me that Antimonium crud. is "an almost specific in Rheumatoid arthritis".