Sulphur


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


Sulphur is such a full remedy that it is somewhat difficult to tell where to begin.

It seems to contain a likeness of all the sicknesses of man, and a beginner on reading over the proving of Sulphur might naturally think that he would need no other remedy, as the image of all sickness seems to be contained in it.

Yet you will find it will not cure all the sicknesses of man, and it is not well to use it indiscriminately any more than you would any other remedy. It seems that the less a physician knows of the Materia Medica the oftener he gives Sulphur, and yet it is very frequently given, even by good prescribers; so that the line between physicians’ ignorance and knowledge cannot be drawn from the frequency with which Sulphur is prescribed by them.

Aspect: The Sulphur patient is a lean, lank, hungry, dyspeptic fellow with stoop shoulders, yet many times it must be given to fat, rotund, well fed people.

The angular, lean, stoop-shouldered patient, however, is the typical one, and especially when he has become so from long periods of indigestion, bad assimilation and feeble nutrition. The Sulphur state is sometimes brought about by being long housed up and adapting the diet to the stomach.

Persons who lead sedentary lives, confined to their rooms in study, in meditation, in philosophical inquiry, and who take no exercise, soon find out that they must eat only the simplest foods, foods not sufficient to nourish the body, and they end up by going into a philosophical mania.

There is another class of patients in whom we see a Sulphur appearance in the face; dirty, shriveled, red-faced people. The skin seems to be easily affected by the atmosphere. He becomes red in the face from riding in the air, both in very cold and in damp weather.

He has a delicate, thin skin, blushing on the slightest occasion, always red and dirty looking, no matter how much he washes it. If it be a child, the mother may wash the face often, but it always looks as if it had been perfunctorily washed.

Hering called the Sulphur patient “the ragged philosopher.”

The Sulphur scholar, the inventor, works day and night in threadbare clothes and battered hat; he has long, uncut hair and a dirty face; his study is uncleanly, it is untidy; books and leaves of books are piled up indiscriminately; there is no order. It seems that Sulfur produces this state of disorder, a state of untidiness, a state of uncleanness, a state of “care how things go,” and a state of selfishness.

He becomes a false philosopher and the more he goes on in this state the more he is disappointed because the world does not consider him the greatest man on earth. Old inventors work and work, and fail.

The complaints that arise in this kind of case, even the acute complaints, will run to Sulphur. You take such a patient and you will notice that he has on a shirt that he has worn many weeks; if he has not a wife to attend to him, he would wear his shirt until it fell off from him.

Cleanliness is not a great idea with the Sulphur patient; he thinks it is not necessary. He is dirty; he does not see the necessity of putting on a clean collar and cuffs and a clean shirt; it does not worry him. Sulphur is seldom indicated in cleanly people, but it is commonly indicated in those who are not disturbed by uncleanliness.

Odor: When attending the public clinic I have many times noticed that after Sulphur an individual begins to take notice of himself and puts on a clean shirt, whereas his earlier appearances were in the one same old shirt. And it is astonishing how the Sulphur patients, especially the little ones, can get their clothing dirty so fast.

Children have the most astonishing tendency to be filthy. Mothers tell you of the filthy things that little ones will do if they be Sulphur patients. The child is subject to catarrhal discharges from the nose, the eyes and from other parts, and he often eats the discharge from the nose. Now, that is peculiar, because offensive odors are the things that the Sulphur patient loathes. He is oversensitive to filthy odors, but filthy substances themselves he will eat and swallow. He becomes nauseated even from the odor of his own body and of his own breath.

The odor of the stool is so offensive that it will follow him around all day. He thinks he can smell it. Because of his sensitiveness to odors he is more cleanly about his bowels than anything else. It is an exaggerated sense of smell. He is always imagining and hunting for offensive odors. He has commonly such a strong imagination that he smells the things which he has only in memory.

The Sulphur patient has filthiness throughout. He is the victim of filthy odors. He has a filthy breath, he has an intensely foetid stool; he has filthy smelling genitals, which can be smelled in the room in spite of his clothing, and he himself smells them. The discharges are always more or less foetid, having strong, offensive odors. In spite of constant washing the axillae give out a pungent odor, and at times the whole body gives off an odor like that coming from the axillae.

Discharges: The discharges of Sulphur from every part of the body, besides being offensive, are excoriating. The Sulfur patient is afflicted with catarrhs of all mucous membranes, and the catarrhal discharges everywhere excoriate him. Often with the coryza the discharge excoriates the lips and the nose.

At times the fluid that remains in the nose smarts like fire, and when it comes in contact with the child’s lip it burns, so acrid is it; almost like the condition under Sulphuricum acid, so red will be the parts that are touched by it.

There is copious leucorrhoea that excoriates the genitals. The thin feces cause burning and rawness around the anus. In women if a drop of urine remains about the genitals it will burn; very often it is not sufficient to wipe it away, it must be washed away to relieve the smarting.

In children we find excoriation about the anus and between the buttocks; the whole length of the fissure is red, raw and inflamed from the stool. From this tendency a keynote has been constructed, and not a bad one either, all the fluids burn the parts over which they pass,” which is the same as saying that the fluids are acrid and cause smarting. This is true everywhere in Sulphur.

Skin: The Sulphur patient has all sorts of eruptions.

There are vesicular, pustular, furuncular, scaly eruptions, all attended with much itching, and some of them with discharge and suppuration. The skin, even without any eruption, itches much, itches from the warmth of the bed and from wearing woolen clothing.

Many times the Sulphur patient cannot wear anything except silk or cotton. The warmth of the room will drive him to despair if he cannot get at the itching part to scratch it. After scratching there is burning with relief of the itching. After scratching or after getting into the warmth of the bed great white welts come out all over the body, with much itching, and these he keeps on scratching until the skin becomes raw, or until it burns, and then comes a relief of the itching.

This process goes on continuously; dreadful itching at right in bed, and in the morning when he wakes up he starts in again and the eruptions itch and ooze. Crops of boils and little boil-like eruptions come out and this makes it useful in impetigo.

This remedy is useful in suppurations. It establishes all sorts of suppurating cavities, small abscesses and large abscesses; abscesses beneath the skin, in the cellular tissues and in internal organs. The suppurative tendency is very marked in Sulphur. The glands become inflamed and the inflammation goes on to suppuration.

Burning: Wherever there is a Sulphur complaint you will find burning.

Every part burns; burning where there is congestion; burning of the skin or a sensation of heat in the skin; burning here and there in spots; burning in the glands, in the stomach, in the lungs; burning in the bowels, in the rectum; burning and smarting in the hemorrhoids; burning when passing urine, or a sensation of heat in the bladder. There is heat here and there, but when the patient describes something especially typical of Sulphur she says:

“Burning of the soles of the feet in the palms of the hands, and on the top of the head.”

Burning of the soles of the feet will very often be noticed after the patient becomes warm in bed. The Sulphur patient has so much heat and burning of the soles at night in bed that he puts the feet out from, beneath the clothes, sleeps with the feet outside the covering. The soles and palms of the Sulphur patient when examined present a thick skin which burns on becoming warm in bed.

Many complaints come on from becoming warm in bed. The Sulphur patient cannot stand heat and cannot stand cold, though there is a strong craving for the open air. He wants an even temperature; he is disturbed if the temperature changes much.

So far as his breathing is concerned, when he has much distress he wants the doors and windows open. The body, however, he is frequently forced to have covered, but if he is warmly clad he is bothered with the itching and burning of the skin.

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.

Comments are closed.