Medorrhinum — the nosode of gonorrhœa, the remedy of the sycotic miasm — is, in Boericke's words, "a powerful and deep-acting medicine, often indicated for chronic ailments due to suppressed gonorrhœa." Clarke quotes Burnett's epithet for it: "the mother of pus and catarrhs."
Its signature is a strange double state. The patient is hurried — Boericke: "Time passes too slowly... Is in a great hurry" — yet exhausted, trembling, in a "state of collapse and trembling all over", wanting "to be fanned all the time." And its modalities are among the oddest in the materia medica: better at the seaside, better lying on the abdomen, better in damp weather — the reverse of most rheumatic remedies.
Because it is a nosode, one point of method comes first. Clarke insists that "the nosodes may be used according to their indications in exactly the same way as other homœopathic remedies, and not merely for manifestations of the disease from which they are derived." The sycotic history — personal or parental — is a clue that puts the remedy on the study list; the symptoms must still agree. For the framework, see our guide to the three miasms.
This guide profiles Medorrhinum for clinical study from Boericke's Materia Medica, Kent's Lectures, Clarke's Dictionary and Boger's Synoptic Key. The originals can be read in full — Clarke's Medorrhinum, Boericke's Medorrhinum and Kent's Medorrhinum — through Similia's free digital materia medica.
The Medorrhinum Constitutional Type
Boger's telegraphic portrait: "Stiff, puffy, achy, sore and rheumatic. Dwarfish. Many pains. SYCOTIC TAINT, poor reaction." The phrase poor reaction is the key — well-selected remedies act briefly or not at all until the nosode clears the ground. Kent describes children who "resist well selected chronic remedies, or are only palliated by well selected remedies. After Med. high they thrive, and remedies act better."
Two ages dominate the picture. First, the inherited complaints of children: Boericke's "children dwarfed and stunted. Chronic catarrhal conditions in children. Nose dirty, tonsils enlarged, thick yellow mucus from nostrils; lips thickened from mouth breathing." Kent adds the marasmic infant, the asthmatic child, the "vicious catarrh of nose or eyelids" — and the parental history that finally explains the case.
Second, the young adult who dates a decline from a suppressed discharge. Kent's portrait is exact: "The pale waxy young men, who crave stimulants and tobacco, who are sensitive to drafts, become stiff after exertion and walking, who perspire easily and are extremely sensitive to cold, who have never been well since having a gonorrhea cured by injections." In women, the married patient with ovarian pains, menstrual troubles and sterility whose history lies with the husband.
Over everything is what Boericke calls "intensity of all sensations" — Clarke: "intense nervous sensibility, especially to touch of garment or a lock of hair by any one not en rapport. Sensibility is exalted almost to clairvoyance."
Mental and Emotional Picture
Hurried, and time passes too slowly. The great keynote. Kent: "Time move too slowly; everybody moves too slowly. He is in a constant hurry, in such a hurry that he gets out of breath." Clarke: "Is in a great hurry; when doing anything is in such a hurry that she gets fatigued." Boger strings the state together: "Hurried; and anxious; and irritable; and sensitive."
Weak memory, lost thread. Boericke: "Weak memory. Loses the thread of conversation." Boger: "Memory weak, can't concentrate; forgets words, names; can't finish sentences." Clarke's prover "begins all right but does not know how to finish" — in case-taking these patients have "great difficulty in stating her symptoms" and must be asked over again (Kent).
Everything seems unreal. Boger: "Feels far off, unreal." Clarke: "a far-off sensation, as though things done to-day occurred a week ago"; "sensation as if all life were unreal, like a dream."
Fear in the dark; someone behind her. Boericke: "Fear in the dark and of some one behind her." Kent: "Thinks some one is behind her; hears whispering. Sees faces that peer at her from behind the furniture."
Anticipation amounting to presentiment. Clarke: "Is always anticipating; feels most matters sensitively before they occur and generally correctly."
Depression of the gravest kind. Recorded plainly, as the textbooks do: "Melancholy, with suicidal thoughts" (Boericke); "hopeless of recovery"; Kent's "wild desperate feeling as if incipient insanity" and "fears going insane"; Clarke's "spirits in the depths, weighed down with heavy, solid gloom, > by torrents of tears", with anxiety about salvation — "feeling as if he had committed the unpardonable sin." The patient "cannot speak without weeping." These are recorded symptomatology for professional assessment of chronic cases.
Physical Affinities
Pelvic and urinary organs
The historic centre of the remedy. In women: "Menses offensive, profuse, dark, clotted; stains difficult to wash out"; "leucorrhœa thin, acrid, excoriating, fishy odor. Sycotic warts on genitals. Ovarian pain, worse left side, or from ovary to ovary. Sterility" (Boericke), with intense menstrual colic and breasts "cold, sore, and sensitive." In men: "nocturnal emissions, followed by great weakness. Impotence. Gleet; whole urethra feels sore", with an enlarged, painful prostate. Urinary sphere: "painful tenesmus when urinating. Nocturnal enuresis. Renal colic... Urine flows very slowly." Kent adds that in gonorrhœal rheumatism "it controls the rheumatic symptoms and restores the discharge" — Boericke likewise: "often restores a gonorrhœal discharge."
Catarrhs and respiration
"Chronic nasal and pharyngeal catarrhs" (Boericke); Kent: "this remedy cures obstinate nasal catarrh, also post nasal obstruction with loss of smell." In the chest, two signatures: "Dyspnœa; cannot exhale" — Boger: "lungs feel stuffed with cotton. Can't exhale" — and the incessant dry night cough that is "better lying on stomach." Clarke preserves McLaren's case of a failing young patient whose cough was observed to be "> from lying on the face"; Medorrhinum brought back the discharge and "the cough and all threatening symptoms promptly disappeared." Asthma is prominent — Kent: "asthma in children of sycotic parents"; Clarke, via Burnett: "sycotic asthma, < 2 to 4 a.m."
Extremities
"Legs heavy; ache all night; cannot keep them still" (Boericke) — the restless-legs picture, with relief from stretching. "Burning of hands feet"; hot palms; "heels and balls of feet tender"; "soreness of soles" — Kent's patient with œdema has soles "so tender he can scarcely walk on them." Ankles turn easily when walking. Finger-joints enlarged and puffy; gouty concretions. The restlessness is "better, clutching hands."
Back and rheumatic sphere
Kent: "'Lame back' is the common complaint of these patients" — lumbago or lumbo-sacral pain extending into the limbs, crural or sciatic, "all aggravated in cold damp weather", with "great heat in the upper part of spine" and a tender, sore spine. Boericke's headline: "Chronic rheumatism... Pains intolerable; tensive; nerves quiver and tingle." Kent notes the paradox within the rheumatism: where there is no swelling "these patients act like Rhus patients", relieved only by motion.
Skin, stool and sleep
"Intense and incessant itching; worse night and when thinking of it. Fiery red rash about anus in babies. Copper-colored spots" (Boericke). Boger: "Fiery red, moist, violently itching anus", and the strange "body smells badly to her; can't wash it off." Stool has one of the remedy's most peculiar keynotes: "Can pass stool only by leaning very far back" — Clarke cured "a most aggravated case of constipation on this indication" with the 200th. In sleep, the patient "sleeps in knee-chest position" and "dreams she is drinking."
Key Modalities
Worse from:
- Daytime — Clarke: "< from sunrise to sunset; always brighter in evening"
- 3–4 a.m. — "the early morning < (especially 3 to 4 a.m.) is a leading characteristic of Medorrh. and all sycotics" (Clarke)
- Thinking of the ailment; heat; a close room
- Inland; before storms; damp cold (the rheumatic pains)
- Touch; after urinating
Better from:
- The seashore — "chronic rheumatism of joints is < inland, > near sea" (Clarke)
- Lying on the abdomen — Boger capitalises "LYING ON ABDOMEN"
- Being fanned; fresh air; uncovering
- Damp weather (Boericke — a rarity shared with Causticum)
- Hard rubbing; stretching out; bending backward
Note the built-in contradiction Clarke records: "great sensitiveness to draught of air; takes cold easily. At the same time there is great desire to be fanned."
Keynote Symptoms
- Hurried; time passes too slowly; everybody moves too slowly
- Weak memory; loses the thread; cannot finish sentences
- Everything seems unreal; far-off, dream-like states
- Fear of the dark; sense of someone behind her
- Better at the seaside; worse inland
- Better lying on the abdomen — cough included
- Cannot exhale; lungs feel stuffed with cotton
- Burning hands and feet; tender heels, balls and soles
- Legs ache all night; cannot keep them still
- Wants to be fanned all the time; collapse with trembling
- Can pass stool only by leaning far back
- Fiery red, violently itching anus; fishy-odour discharges
- Sleeps in the knee-chest position
- Ravenous hunger soon after eating; craves liquor, salt, sweets
Clinical Applications
The recorded territory is chronic and constitutional. Chronic pelvic disorders in women — ovarian pain, dysmenorrhœa, obstinate leucorrhœa, sterility. Gleet, prostatitis and gonorrhœal rheumatism in men, restoring the suppressed discharge as the rheumatism resolves. Obstinate catarrhs of nose, throat and chest; sycotic asthma worse 2–4 a.m. Marasmus, catarrhal and bowel complaints of children with a sycotic inheritance — Clarke's compilation runs through favus, blepharitis dating from childhood, offensive body odours, the fiery red napkin-area rash, and rickety children better at the seaside. Nocturnal enuresis. Renal colic. Clarke and Kent both stress its role as a reaction remedy: when a well-taken chronic case with this history simply fails to respond, Medorrhinum "will bring better reaction, and sometimes be the remedy for many months" (Kent). Wildes' caution in Clarke belongs here: it is rarely if ever to be given in the acute stages of a disease, because of the intensity of aggravation it can cause.
Differential Diagnosis
Medorrhinum vs. Thuja. Boger lists Thuja among the related remedies, and they share the sycotic ground — warts and condylomata, catarrhs, the fig-wart diathesis. Thuja is the chief anti-sycotic of the plant kingdom, with its fixed ideas and secretive rigidity; Medorrhinum is the nosode itself — hurried, unreal, time-distorted, seaside-relieved — reserved for cases where the taint is inherited or the suppression historic, and where Thuja-like prescriptions have not held. Boericke's tender "heels and balls of feet" carries a direct cross-reference to Thuja.
Medorrhinum vs. Tuberculinum. The two great inherited-taint nosodes of restless dissatisfaction. Tuberculinum's restlessness is the cosmopolitan desire for change and travel, with cold-taking on the slightest exposure and longing for open air; Medorrhinum's is the hurry with time passing too slowly, the burning feet and the night-restless legs, with the seaside amelioration as the sharpest separating general. Both crave open air and both resist well-selected remedies; the family history and the modality-set decide.
Medorrhinum vs. Syphilinum. The classical time-of-day pair among the nosodes. Clarke: Syphilinum "has < from sunset to sunrise, as also have all the great anti-syphilitic remedies. Medorrh. has < from sunrise to sunset; always brighter in evening." Kent quotes the maxim — "Med. in daytime and Syph. at night" — and immediately qualifies it: it "does not hold good as a sweeping statement... the mental symptoms of Med. are most violent at night."
Medorrhinum vs. Rhus toxicodendron. Within the rheumatic sphere Kent draws the line himself: where swelling is absent "these patients act like Rhus patients; they are sensitive to cold, suffer from aching and torturesome pains, and find relief only in motion." Boger notes Medorrhinum "follows: Rhus-t." — the nosode completes what the acute remedy palliates when the sycotic history underlies the case.
Repertorisation Tips
These rubrics carry Medorrhinum in high grade:
- Mind; TIME; passes too slowly, appears longer
- Mind; HURRY, haste
- Mind; FEAR; dark, of
- Mind; DELUSIONS; someone behind him, is
- Mind; UNREAL; everything seems
- Generalities; SEASHORE; amel.
- Generalities; LYING; abdomen, on; amel.
- Generalities; FANNED, wants to be
- Rectum; CONSTIPATION; leaning far back, can pass stool only when
- Extremities; HEAT; feet; soles; burning
- Extremities; RESTLESSNESS; legs; night
- Sleep; POSITION; knee-chest
Anchor on the strange generals — seaside amelioration, lying on the abdomen, the daytime aggravation — plus the hurried time-distortion, and let the sycotic history direct the study rather than decide the prescription. The pelvic, catarrhal and rheumatic particulars then confirm. Our beginner's guide to repertorisation sets out the method in more detail.
Deepening Your Study
- Boericke compresses the essentials — the time-distortion, the seaside and abdomen modalities, the burning feet — and states the potency rule
- Kent's Lectures give the living portraits: the sycotic child, the pale waxy young man, and the doctrine of poor reaction and restored discharges
- Clarke's Dictionary is the richest clinical archive — the Burnett cures, the sunrise-to-sunset law, the leaning-back constipation case — and the methodological note on prescribing nosodes
- Boger's Synoptic Key delivers the constitution in telegraph style: stiff, puffy, achy, sore; hurried and anxious and irritable and sensitive
You can read all of these side by side for any remedy through Similia's free digital materia medica. To place Medorrhinum among its peers, see the guide to the essential polycrest remedies, or read how materia medica and repertory work together in case analysis.
