Ricerca e Innovazione

Pyrogenium Post 1

Etymology: pyro-genium=fireproducer

Pyrogenium was prepared by Doctor in 1875 “from sterilized putridity” of decomposing beef left in the sun for two weeks (“He placed some chopped lean beef in water and allowed it…to decompose. From this rotten beef, with its swarming menagerie of bacterial life, Pyrogenium and its dilutions were made.” It is a nosode, the importance of which it is not possible to overrate (Choudhury). It is a grand nosode — one of the greatest monuments to Samuel Hahnemann and to Homoeopathy, as it covers a very wide range of action, and fills a place of its own that no other can fill.

Drysdale cites Saunderson’s experiments on animals which show that “…Pyrogenium given in lethal doses kills — having produced changes in blood and tissues analogous to those of septicaemia after wounds; while in non-lethal doses, after severe symptoms, the animal, in a few hours, recovered its normal appetite and liveliness with wonderful rapidity…showing that this septic poison has not the slightest tendency to multiply in the organism.”

History

Doctor of Liverpool prepared the remedy (as above) in the UK, Dr. Swan prepared it in the USA from septic pus and ran it up to the CM, and Doctor proved it in the highest potencies, because, having had blood poisoning 27 years before, was evidently highly sensitive to the action.

James Compton Burnett wrote a monograph on his experience of using it in typhoid cases. Swan, H.C. Allen (of Allen’s Keynotes), Clarke and other homoeopathic doctors all described their experiences with it.

Shedd prepared the nosode Sepsin from it, the pathology of which is remarkably similar to that published for Pyrogenium in the other materia medicas. His account, in Anschutz’s New, Old and Forgotten Remedies, marks the fullest account of Pyrogenium’s (Sepsin) pathology.

C.M. Boger writes: “With Pyrogenium it is now possible to make direct cures of cases which were formerly cured in a roundabout way with Eupatorium, Arnica and Rhus toxicodendron, or Arsenicum, by treating first one group of symptoms and then another. Its pathogenic action greatly resembles that of the combined characteristics of these remedies in that it causes an aching in the bones as if they would break, bruised soreness of the flesh and restlessness; picturing a blood infection in which the pulse soon becomes accelerated out of all proportion to the height of the temperature or the severity of the other symptoms.

The heart seems to feel the brunt of the attack and its action is greatly increased. Pyrogenium is…a remedy for all types of septic states when blood is disorganized, heart becomes weak and muscles prostrated. Hectic, typhoid, typhus, ptomaine poisoning, diphtheria, dissecting wounds, sewer-gas poisoning, chronic malaria after-effects of miscarriage, all these conditions at times may present symptoms calling for this unique medicine.”

Like Baptisia, to which it bears great resemblance, it is characterised by a horrible offensiveness of all the discharges of the body: the breath, sweat, vomit, menstrual, lochia, stools, diarrhea, and other excretions are rendered prominent by this carrion-like smell. The next feature is a great soreness of the body, in consequence of which the bed on which they lie down seems hard and uncomfortable. They keep on moving constantly in search of a soft place and a comfortable position.