Temperaments

Definition

• The sum of physical peculiarities of an individual exclusive of all tendencies to disease.
• Different temperaments give different degrees of peculiarity to disease, but they do not evolve the disease itself.
• Temperament is physiological and diathesis pathological.

Four Temperaments

• Yellow bile, Choleric / / Bilious
• Black bile, Melancholic / Nervous
• Phlegm, Phlegmatic / Lymphatic
• Blood, Sanguine

Sanguine temperament

Acon

• It is excellence a remedy for sanguine temperament and rarely a remedy for any diathesis
• It suits the robust constitution, the full, active circulation; the rapidity with which such a temperament is invaded, the circulatory storm that sweeps these constitutions
• Tendency to congestion

Caust

• Dark hair, rigid fiber
• Greatly resembles Acon

Nervous temperament

Such patients will suffer from mental strain and are worse from inactive, sedentary habits. A suppression of this nervous activity results disastrously.

Nux-v

• Nux-v is great remedy for the nervous temperament in males
• Nux-v acts best in spare, slim people; not so well in the fleshy, the irascible, the quick acting, the sallow and yellow.
• Nux-v may counterfeit the sanguine at times with its red cheeks, but these are on a yellow background, and this shows the bilious mixture, for seldom are temperaments pure.

Ign

• Ign is great remedy for the nervous temperament iin females

Sepia

• It acts well in men and women who are puffed and flabby, who have a yellow, blotched, brown and dirty skin
• They are inclined to sweat in the armpits, genitals and back
• They suffer from hot flashes and morning headache.
• In other words, a mixture of the lymphatic and bilious

Gelsemium with its sickly apathy, its dulness, drowsiness and stupidity will never find a place here.

Phlegmatic temperament

Puls

• Pulsatilla is a purely lymphatic remedy.
• Note its timorous, fearful state of mind and sluggish venous conditions.
• This effeminate disposition, this blue-eyed, freckled damsel that hasn’t much of a will of her own, lacks backbone, is the very type that offers the most suitable soil for the action of Pulsatilla.
• To be sure Pulsatilla can act under less favorable conditions, can show its power, for instance, on a high-strung, passionate, determined gentleman from the South; but here our drug is hampered and dwarfed in its action. Remember a drug’s best natural soil, but do not forget that it can act in other less favored individuals.

Sul

• Sulp is another remedy for lymphatic constitutions,
• Suiting like Puls the light-complexioned, easily angered, though, too, it suits the dark, being a mainstay in the treatment of the negro, but here perhaps owing to the large amount of scrofula in this race.
• The skin eruptions, the offensive odors, the sluggishness of the lymphatic temperament is here.

Agar

• Agar is suitable to light hair, lax skin and muscles, and to old people with indolent circulations.

Alum / Con

• Alum and Con suit dry, thin, withered subjects and old people.

Graph

• Graph is applicable best to the fleshy, sad, constipated individual with inclination to delayed menses.
• Sec suits the tall and scrawny, the lax muscular fibre, the feeble and cachectic, the old and decrepit.

Sil

• Sil suits the large headed, the defective growing, the nervous, the non-resisting, the leucophlegmatic and sanguine.

Calc

• Calc for the large, fat, unwieldy body, the rapidly growing, the sluggish, the over-active, the self- willed; but the great field of this remedy is in the correcting of diatheses to which it is specially adapted.

Thuj

• Thuj is a remedy for the dark, black haired, the dry fibre, those of a lymphatic tendency and lethargic nature.

Clinical suggestion

• The value of taking these temperaments into consideration in prescribing
• For example in treating a Bry or Rhus-t rheumatism, if you diagnose nervous temperament, an occasional dose of Nux-v will help in the cure, if you have Nux-v features.
• Or in treating of a Oenanthe crocata epilepsy in a lymphatic temperament, someintercurrent dosed of Calc Accelerate the process of healing. Diatheses.