Medorrhinum — Homeopathic Remedy Profile

Medorrhinum is the sycotic nosode, prepared from gonorrheal discharge and prescribed only in potentized form from 30C upward. Robin Murphy places it among the most important nosodes of the materia medica, a deep-acting remedy for chronic states that trace back to suppressed gonorrhea in the patient or in an ancestor. Its picture spans mind, nerves and mucous membranes, and its prescribing territory reaches across chronic sinusitis, severe allergic asthma, pelvic complaints, rheumatism worse inland and better at the sea, and the difficult catarrhal childhood.

At a Glance

Source and Preparation

The remedy comes from a nosological source, the gonorrheal discharge itself, potentised through the ordinary homeopathic process of trituration and serial dilution with succussion. Because Medorrhinum exists only as a dynamic preparation, and no mother tincture or low decimal is in circulating use, the herbal register does not apply. What acts is the dynamic preparation prescribed on the totality of the case, at 30C, 200C or the LM scale, meeting the self-governing principle where it can react.

The nosode sits with Psorinum, Syphilinum and Tuberculinum as one of the four principal miasmatic prescriptions. Murphy notes it particularly in cases of "poor reaction to remedies due to gonorrhea history", a repertorial hint that saves many stalled cases. The symptoms should be treated as self-expressions of the organism whose ancestral or personal ground is sycotic, not as isolated complaints to be silenced.

The Essence of the Remedy

The essence is disintegration under sycotic pressure. The patient is at once hurried, restless, wild in the head, and extraordinarily sensitive. Everything startles her. She weeps while telling her story, loses the thread of a sentence and has to start again. Clarke and Murphy both describe the sensation of unreality: things done today feel as if they occurred a week ago; time passes too slowly; life itself seems unreal, like a dream. Sensitivity to nature, animals, beauty and flowers coexists with cruelty and abusiveness. Cross through the day, merry at night. Despair of recovery alongside undiminished sexual passion. Contrasting extremes in the same person.

The physical picture answers this at the level of tissue. Discharges are profuse, acrid, fishy in odor. Mucous membranes chronically catarrhal. Warts and condylomata on the sycotic territory. Joints loose and painful, worse in cold damp weather, better near the sea. Temperature regulation is disordered: the skin is cold but the blood feels hot, so the patient throws off the covers and asks to be fanned, wanting the burning soles uncovered even while the trunk shivers.

Clinical Portrait

Mind and temperament

The mind is the ground of the prescription. Murphy's opening lines return again and again to states that would be described in ordinary language as ungovernable: sensitive, nervous, restless; hurried, anxious and irritable; wild feeling in head; lack of self-control. The patient cries when telling her story and cannot say it just once. She tells it over and over, cannot state her symptoms, dreads saying the wrong thing.

The fear tone is specific. Fear in the dark. Fear of someone standing behind her. Fear of being alone at night. Claustrophobia. Fear of animals. Fear of insanity, of venereal diseases, of cancer, of poverty. Anticipation and panic attacks with anxiety if a time is set. Fear that something bad will happen, especially with the health. Belief in one's own incurability. Compare here the fear of insanity of Calcarea carbonica and of Cannabis indica; the wildness of Medorrhinum is more restless and less watchful.

Alternation is characteristic. Happiness turns to gloom without transition. Manic depression, schizophrenia and paranoid states sit in the same catalogue as amorousness, jealousy, morbid impulses and cruelty. What holds the picture together is not a mood but the loss of a governing centre: the patient is unharnessed, disintegrated, without purpose or function, absorbed in fulfilling passions.

Sexuality carries much of the prescribing weight. Wild, strong, high sex drive. Sexual perversions, fantasies and masturbation. Precocity in children, some of whom begin masturbating at an early age. Ailments from sexual excesses, from verbal or sexual abuse, from rape. The source states this plainly and the prescriber accepts it plainly: where the marker is present, it selects the remedy.

Beside the passion sits the collapse. Memory fails for names, words, errands. The patient makes mistakes reading and writing. She loses her thread. Concentration is difficult; she shuns responsibility; self-confidence is poor. Children present as dwarfed, stunted, mentally retarded or arrested in development, with offensive body odour that resists washing. Clarke reported cures of extremely offensive body odour in children with the nosode, on the same hereditary hypothesis.

The strange sensations

Some Medorrhinum sensations are so peculiar that a repertory search on them alone reaches the remedy. Time passes too slowly. Things done today feel long past. She sees faces peering at her from behind the bed and furniture. She feels as if she stared at everything. A sensation of having committed the unpardonable sin. She prays continually. A sensation of impending death arrives without warning and without a physical trigger.

Head, eyes and face

A tight band across the forehead, worse bending the head forward. Burning pain in the brain, worse at the occiput. Intense burning in the cerebellum. Weight and pressure at the vertex. Aching at the base of the brain with swelling of the neck cords. Headache over the eyes and in the temples on waking, worse in sunlight.

The eyes carry the sycotic mark. Ptosis of the lids. Swelling of the upper lids, which feel hard as if a cartilage lay inside them. Eyelashes fall out. The patient feels as if sticks were in her eyes, or as if a cold wind blew across them. Objects look double or small. Clarke records the case of a young woman of twenty-three whose chronic blepharitis had persisted since the age of eleven; gaslight was intolerable, evenings impossible in company, mornings painful because the lids stuck shut with discharge. She had been under careful homeopathic treatment throughout. On learning that her father had been treated for gonorrhea before his marriage, her physician prescribed Medorrhinum in high potency, single doses repeated as the effect of each wore off. She was entirely cured. The case is a small classic of the miasmatic prescription.

The face is freckled and pale, with a greasy gray-green tinge at the edge of the hair. Red spiderlets on the cheeks. Small boils breaking out during the menses. Acne worse after menses. Lips thickened from mouth breathing. Rigidity of the muscles of the face. Warts.

Nose, throat and respiratory

Thick yellow-green discharges dominate the nose and post-nasal territory. Chronic sinusitis with obstruction at the root of the nose. Coryza with loss of smell and taste, better from sea bathing. Nasal catarrh running down the throat. Snuffles in children with "dirty" noses and lips thickened from mouth breathing. Hay fever and multiple allergies with discharges since gonorrhea. Chronic pharyngeal catarrh with thick, grey or bloody mucus filling the throat.

The chest picture is severe. Air hunger, and the extraordinary characteristic that the patient cannot exhale. Wakes gasping. Asthma is better only lying on the abdomen and protruding the tongue, a modality so specific that when seen it selects the remedy without further work. Sycotic infantile asthma. Sycotic asthma worse from three to four in the morning. Rattling, wheezing on lying on the back or either side. Painful shock at the base of each lung on coughing. Cough better lying face down, worse from sweet things and on entering a warm room. Ropy mucus difficult to raise. Incipient tuberculosis.

Digestion and abdomen

The stomach picture centers on the solar plexus. Agonising pains there, the patient applying the hands to stomach and to the lumbar region for relief. Clawing pain worse drawing up the knees. Ravenous hunger soon after eating, and a sick, gnawing feeling that eating and drinking do not relieve. Coppery taste, foul breath in the morning, belchings of sulphuretted hydrogen. Vomiting of thick mucus and black bile without nausea. Water tastes like perfume.

Cravings distinguish the remedy: ice, unripe green fruit, oranges and orange juice especially in children, salt, sweets, sour and refreshing things, fat, fish, tobacco, ale, and later liquors that the patient once disliked. Excessive thirst, dreaming of drinking water.

The abdomen rests more comfortably lying face down. Grinding colic better bracing the feet and lying on the abdomen: the same posture that eases the asthma. Constipation has its own signature: stools tenacious, claylike, sluggish, that cannot be forced out; the patient can pass them only by leaning very far back on the seat. Clarke reported a case cured with Medorrhinum 200C of a man whose stool could not be voided by any other means; his urine also contained long white mucus shreds, and he had had gonorrhea many years before. Where this posture is confessed, the prescription is direct.

Female sphere

The uterine and ovarian territory is central. Dysmenorrhea with intense menstrual colic, drawing up of the knees, relief from pressing the feet against a support. Menses profuse, dark, clotted and offensive; the stains difficult to wash out, the fishy signature that runs through every discharge of the remedy. Metrorrhagia. Vaginitis. Leucorrhea thick, acrid, excoriating, fishy in odour, with intense vaginal itching better for rubbing and for bathing with tepid water.

Ovarian pain worse on the left, or passing from ovary to ovary, better for pressure. A sensitive spot near the os. Ulcerated cervix. Sycotic warts on the genitals. Sycotic infertility, where the couple presents no anatomical obstacle and an ancestral or personal gonorrheal history sits behind the case. Burnett reported cures with Medorrhinum 1M of fits appearing at every menstrual period, arriving in the early morning.

Breasts sore and swollen between periods. Nipples sore, oozing, sometimes icy while the rest of the body is warm. A gummy secretion dries at the orifice; picking it off makes the nipple bleed freely.

Male sphere

Urethritis and gleet, persistent yellow discharge staining the linen yellow. Whole urethra feels sore. Prostate heavy and enlarged, with frequent and painful urination. Heaviness in the perineum. Intense and frequent erections day and night; amorous behaviour; sexual perversions, fantasies, chronic masturbation, sexual excesses. Impotence and prostration after seminal emission. Nocturnal emissions followed by great weakness. Sharp cutting pains transversely across the root of the penis. The male picture is often sycotic excess and sycotic collapse in the same patient over months.

Urinary tract

Cystitis with burning pains, prescribed here on the UTI hub. Polyuria. Incontinence on getting cold. Cannot retain the urine more than an hour. Nocturnal bedwetting in children with dirty noses and offensive body odour, a triad practically diagnostic of the remedy. Chills after urinating with great coldness and shivering, better once urination completes. Kidney colic. When stooping the patient cannot rise again without violent pain in the kidney region. Urine watery and colourless, or intensely yellow, covered with a thick greasy pellicle. Scalding ammoniacal urine. Urine stains a dirty brown. Enormous quantities of high-coloured, strong-smelling urine passed in bed every night.

Limbs and rheumatism

Chronic rheumatism is one of the largest prescribing territories of the nosode in a sycotic constitution. Stiffness throughout body and limbs. Loss of power in the joints, joints feel loose, gouty concretions. Legs heavy, aching all night, cannot be kept still. Where this restless-legs picture has failed to respond to Zincum metallicum and the sycotic ground is present, Medorrhinum takes over. Cramps in the legs better stretching them. Ankles turn easily on walking. Heels and balls of feet tender and itching, so that the patient cannot walk on them and has taken to walking on the knees. Burning of hands and feet, wanting them uncovered and fanned. Finger joints puffy and enlarged. Nails depressed as if bent.

The rheumatism worsens inland and mends near the sea. A patient whose joints trouble her at home but who returns from a coastal holiday with everything quiet already points to Medorrhinum before the mind picture has even been taken.

Skin

Intense itching, sore, worse at night and when thinking of it. This last modality is peculiar and worth listening for: the itch rises when attention rises. Skin cold, the blood feels hot, so the covers come off. Yellow, copper-colored spots remaining after eruptions. Sycotic red nodes. Deep red spots. Boils. Condylomata and warts, including small pedunculated warts. Dandruff with dry, crispy hair and itching of the scalp. Psoriasis palmaris. Fiery red rash about the anus in babies.

Sleep

Insomnia from too much energy, or from intolerable pains, or from aching in the lower limbs. Sleepless through the night, then falling asleep towards morning; the general modality "worse from sunrise to sunset" lands here on sleep. A short sleep feels like a long one and is refreshing. The patient sleeps in the knee-chest position, or more comfortably lying on the abdomen, or on the back with the hands over the head. Nightmares of ghosts and dead people. Children have severe nightmares and deep fears about monsters or people getting them, and the delusion that someone stands in the bedroom.

Modalities

Worse:

• Damp, cold weather; before a storm
• From sunrise to sunset; early morning aggravation
• 3 a.m. to 4 a.m., especially the asthma
• Heat, covering, closed rooms
• Thinking of the ailments
• Slight touch
• After urinating
• Stretching out; leaning the head forward
• Salt-water bathing aggravates sore throat and colds in the head

Better:

• At the seashore
• Delete this bullet — damp weather is already established as a Worse modality for Medorrhinum and does not belong in the Better list.
• Being fanned; fresh air; at sunset
• Bending backward; hard rubbing
• Lying on the abdomen; asthma better with the tongue protruded
• Constipation only by leaning far back
• Menstrual colic by pressing the feet against a support

The general "worse from sunrise to sunset, brighter in the evening" is nearly pathognomonic and distinguishes the remedy from Syphilinum, whose day and night are reversed.

Relationships

Sycotic prescription places Medorrhinum next to Thuja. The two are similar in territory and work on different levels: where Medorrhinum answers the acute manifestation, Thuja often answers the chronic follow-up, and the two interrelate over months. Arsenicum album is described in Murphy as a less serious Medorrhinum, useful where restlessness, fastidiousness and collapse lead the picture. For the wanting to be fanned in a collapsed state, Carbo vegetabilis shares the call for air on the same ground. For the tobacco craving as nervous habit, Staphysagria and Thuja share the territory.

Clinical Uses

Chronic sycotic asthma

Where the paroxysm arrives between 3 and 4 a.m., where the patient cannot exhale and finds relief only by lying face down with the tongue out, the posture alone selects the remedy. The mental picture may or may not confirm; the posture is enough. Practitioners ordinarily use 200C upward for chronic use, single dose repeated as the effect of the previous dose wears off. Where the child has a dirty nose, offensive body odour, bedwetting and severe nightmares, the same nosode addresses the constitutional ground beneath the paroxysm.

Rheumatism worse inland, better by the sea

The chronic rheumatism of the remedy is recognized by geography as much as by joint list. Joints trouble the patient at home and quiet at the coast. Ankles turn easily. Heels are so tender that the patient walks on the knees. Legs cannot rest at night. Where the sycotic history is behind the case, the prescription rarely misses.

Chronic pelvic complaints in women

Vaginitis and leucorrhea with fishy odour. Ovarian pain especially left-sided, better for pressure. Dysmenorrhea with drawing up of the knees, relieved by bracing the feet. Ancestral or personal history of gonorrhea. Sycotic infertility. The older case literature also links post-partum pelvic cellulitis to latent gonorrhea in the husband, and Medorrhinum has a place there that no other polychrest fills.

Difficult children

The stunted, dwarfed, arrested or mentally slow child with a dirty nose, offensive body odour, bedwetting and a red rash about the anus. The precocious child masturbating at an unusually early age. Clarke cured extremely offensive body odour in children with the remedy. Murphy also records that Skinner traced a case of favus, resistant to every external application and so offensive that the boy had to be isolated from his family, to the same hereditary sycotic cause; a single dose of Medorrhinum 1M cleared it.

Chronic constipation with the postural marker

Stools tenacious, claylike, passed only by leaning far back. Where the posture is confessed and a personal or ancestral gonorrheal history is present, the prescription is direct.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Medorrhinum the right remedy for anyone with a history of gonorrhea?

Not automatically. The history is the ground of a possible prescription; the totality of the case decides the actual one. Where the history has left the organism unable to react to otherwise well-selected remedies — Murphy's "poor reaction to remedies due to gonorrhea history" — the nosode is often the intercurrent that unblocks the case. Where a polychrest is answering the case cleanly, that polychrest is the prescription.

What potency and repetition are appropriate?

Because Medorrhinum exists only as a dynamic preparation, questions of dose in the pharmacological sense do not arise. Practitioners typically prescribe 200C and above for chronic states, following Kent and Clarke. Single doses repeated only as the effect of each wears off, in the manner Clarke records for the blepharitis and constipation cases, is a defensible protocol. Burnett used 1M for the menstrual fits, Burnett used 1M for the menstrual fits, Skinner 1M for the favus of the isolated boy.

How does Medorrhinum differ from Thuja?

Both are sycotic remedies. Thuja tends to answer the chronic case where the patient is fixed, one-sided and secretive; Medorrhinum tends to answer states of collapse, extremes and unreality, and often carries the acute manifestation for which Thuja is the chronic follow-up. Murphy notes that the two remedies work on different levels and interrelate.

Is the remedy safe for children?

Because Medorrhinum is prepared only from 30C upward, no material of the source remains, and questions of infectious transmission do not arise even in principle. The pediatric picture — dwarfed, stunted, dirty-nosed, offensive-smelling children with bedwetting, severe nightmares, and a craving for oranges and unripe fruit — is one of the historical strongholds of the nosode.

References

1. Murphy, R. Homoeopathic Medical Repertory, 3rd revised edition. Lotus Health Institute, 2005. Medorrhinum entry.
2. Clarke, J. H. A Dictionary of Practical Materia Medica, 3 vols. Homoeopathic Publishing Company, London, 1900. Medorrhinum entry, including the Deschere blepharitis case and the constipation case cured with 200C.
3. Boericke, W. Pocket Manual of Homoeopathic Materia Medica, 9th edition. Boericke & Runyon, 1927. Medorrhinum entry.
4. Kent, J. T. Lectures on Homoeopathic Materia Medica. Ehrhart & Karl, Chicago, 1912. Nosodes chapter.
5. Burnett, J. C. Fifty Reasons for Being a Homoeopath. Homoeopathic Publishing Company, London, 1888. Cured cases with Medorrhinum 1M.