Shivani Shivaputra Ghodekar
Sepia officinalis is also referred to as Cuttlefish. Typically found in the Mediterranean Sea. The ink was made using pure pigments. Cuttlefish ink has long been used as a pigment in painters’ paints. It was used medicinally in ancient times to cure gonorrhoea and kidney stones.
In 1834, Hahnemann provided information on the homeopathic medicine. He discovered the solution after seeing that an artist buddy who licked his sepia-soaked paintbrush frequently suffered an unusual sickness induced by the ink. It is an effective treatment for women’s problems. Dr. Gibson Miller has remarked that if he could only preserve one medicine, it would be Sepia.
Margaret Tyler dubs Sepia as the “Washerwoman’s Remedy”. She is compared to a sallow, exhausted mother of a large household on a “washing day”. She is drenched in sweat, dripping beneath her arms. The cold wind that rushes in at the open door is almost intolerable to her, but she cannot shut it because of the heat. Her back hurts so badly that she feels relieved only by pushing it. Her entire inside seems to be dragging down and leaking out of her, so she feels compelled to sit down or cross her legs to hold it in.
As a mother she is unable to handle her child’s anxiety. Her baby cries and wails and wants to be lifted and carried. And she reaches her breaking point when her six-year-old begins to drum on a tin pot with a spoon. Things don’t get better when she hits her little kid and grabs the tin pot and throws it. She does not seem to care that he howls pitifully. She just wants to flee, get away from everything, and find some peace. If only she could just leave everyone and everything behind, take a seat by herself in the darkness, and close her eyes. She is a pot-bellied mother, her face is puffy, pale, yellow, and almost earthy. Eyelids appear heavy and drooping
As we know that, the female cuttlefish produce 100 – 200 tiny eggs . The female do not care for eggs and soon after spawing become lethargic, quickly deteriorates & die. Similarly the indifference to children and to loved ones is a keynote Sepia mothers are known to have, and this is what is observed in nature. The cuttlefish don’t watch their eggs nor defend them against predators or even show any interest in the fate of their young.
When her spouse enters, she is not grinning to welcome him. All that is present is suffering, fatigue, and apathy. He needs to give her some space. She needs to get to work. If only she could close, her eyes while lying down, she knows she would become a different lady if she slept for even 10 minutes. However, there are the soapsuds, the steam, the stuffiness, and the terrors of her fidgety and noisy children. She is not able to sleep. She feels very ill just by smelling the food that is cooking. Her husband is waiting for his dinner and the children also go hungry. She doesn’t care. She is apathetic, uninterested, and impatient.
When her husband asks, “what is your problem???”, she does not like it and
Yells and shouts. Her husband comes to doctor and says, “she was a bright girl when i married her but now what has happened to her?” She is an unpleasant, ill-tempered woman, characterized by scolding, nagging, she has outburst of temper and floods of tears. She has her own fears. Fear of something terrible might happen, fear of going insane, worry about finance. She is really not alive inside.
The fundamental emotion of the Sepia lady is that she feels compelled to do things against her will. She has been oppressed and denied her own wishes in this ongoing circumstance. In Sepia, there is a sense of dependency. She believes that her body is damaged and ugly, particularly in the eyes of the other sex. She must do what he wants, not what she wants, to keep him happy and get his acceptance. Because she feels inadequate, she is compelled against her will to accept certain events. She feels bad about herself and is miserable because of this.
There’s a part of her that urges, “Be independent, do what you want to do, keep yourself busy.” Indeed, Sepia enjoys keeping herself busy both intellectually and physically; she enjoys dancing and other fast motions. However, she will lose her support and be unable to satisfy her husband and kids if she becomes very independent. Dependency could be financial (fear of poverty) or emotional. She is compelled to do things she does not want to do far too frequently. This is the unsuccessful, uncompensated side. One who is independent from the start is a successful Sepia. However, she will be controlled or coerced into doing things in life that she does not want to.
She has a need of freedom and desires to escape just like the rebellious cuttle-fish fish who wants to come out of her shell but not successful , in the same way sepia women also rebels, but can’t leave her shell, her home, her family, her responsibility, finally land in discontentment
Sepia aspires to free herself from the burden of love by entering a world devoid of human feelings, namely a vocation. This introduces the second face of Sepia, who has an enjoyable career or is doing exciting work with her concurrently with her home duties.
As a result, either the patients separate or get divorced, or they stay single. Also, a large number of them join Women’s club. However, she typically strives to pursue her work while still trying to make her spouse and kids happy. This can get really taxing. Because she is constantly occupied, she gets depressed and tired. She gradually begins to feel hopeless and uncaring about the situation, and in an attempt to get solace from her misery, she keeps herself busy all the time. She turns inside and grows hostile toward her spouse and kids. I’ve observed that Sepia ladies at this stage even detest taking medication.
She feels compelled to have sex against her will because she is exhausted and doesn’t want to, but she does it to please her husband. Lachesis and sepia are similar in that both have dreams of snakes and envy, but Lachesis places more of a focus on maintaining her beauty. She feels as though she must prevail in a competition. Sepia’s central themes is unrequited love and the pressure to seem pretty. She features sarcasm, charming frenzy, and dancing, and a young Sepia. Her focus is more on beauty. She deals with the issue of the body being disfigured and the disillusionment in love. The primary issue is between vocation and relationship. This nature of Sepia can be compared with the cuttle fish as it usually appears to have a very odd disfigured shape similarly a sepia woman features a lean male like pelvis.
When we look into her physical characteristics, she appears to be a tall, slim woman with small, flat breasts and narrow hips. The voluptuous curves of ripe womanhood fail to develop. Like young boys, they remain straight up and down. She is not well built for a woman, or for childbearing. The face of these thin types is usually lean, angular and hard. They are often troubled by fine, dark hair above the upper lip, which may appear as a distinct moustache. They may have excess hair on other parts of the body, showing a general tendency to hirsutism.
When healthy, Sepia happens to be a conscientious person who feels a deep sense of duty toward their family and friends. She is devoted, loyal and faithful. Sepia experiences love not as a excitement or enjoyment (PHOS) not as a blessing as natural and necessary as the sun (PULS) not as a rare and beautiful gift (NAT M) but rather as a responsibility or even a burden. Therefore, marriage becomes a turning point in her life. She is forced to undertake things opposed to her intentions, to do what she does not want to do.
One of the cuttlefish’s most impressive characteristics is its ability to change colors to mimic the environment in which it is swimming. They imitate a variety of hues and shapes to blend in and remain undetectable. When they are afraid or assaulted, they shoot a dark jet of ink into the water. The ink does not dissipate instantly and takes the appearance of an object, eventually tricking its predator while the cuttlefish changes colour and darts off in another direction. Similarly, the Sepia person’s capacity to change colours is represented by his or her tendency to appear pleasant and welcoming but then become argumentative, stubborn, and narrow-minded. Many women who require Sepia develop male characteristics in the workplace, altering their own hues by denying their femininity.
The cuttlefish has no sedentary behaviours; it is always in motion, except when it needs to be entirely still for defence. It swims slowly forward but can swim backward quite quickly. Similarly, the Sepia individual does not sit. She enjoys being active and benefits from exercise. They want to get away from intimate emotional attachments and the responsibilities that come with them. Such folks can be there one moment and then completely absent the next.
REFERENCES
- Coulter, C. R. (1998).Portraits of homoeopathic medicines: Psychophysical analyses of selected constitutional types v. 1. Ninth House Publishing.
- Tyler, M. L. (1970). Homoeopathic Drug Pictures (2nd ed.). C W Daniel.
- Kent, J. T. (2023). Lectures on homoeopathic materia medica: Together with Kent’s “new remedies” incorporated & arranged in one alphabetical order. B Jain
- Bailey, P. (1995). Homeopathic Psychology. North Atlantic Books.
Dr. Shivani Shivaputra Ghodekar
PG Scholar, Department of Homoeopathic Materia Medica
Father Muller Homoeopathic Medical College and Hospital, Mangaluru
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