That was a very unusual result. I have many times prescribed for patients with the utmost endeavors to do the same thing, and have cured the patient in other respects, but the stricture would remain. Remember then that Hepar has fig warts, chronic sycotic discharges, or chronic gonorrhoea, offensive, cheesy discharges, the sensation of sticks in the urethra, inflammatory stricture, which will be associated with difficulty in passing urine, to the extent that there is a weakness of the bladder and the urine falls perpendicularly.
Suppuration: Hepar has served a valuable purpose in its ability to establish suppuration around foreign bodies. For instance, a foreign body is under the skin or is somewhere unknown. Perhaps it is the tip end of a projectile after the projectile itself has been taken away, or under the nail a splinter is forming a suppuration. It is so small that it is hardly observed and it is supposed often that the splinter has been entirely removed, but an inflammatory condition starts up.
Hepar if indicated by the general symptoms of the patient hastens the suppuration and heals up the finger, for it has all such things. Silica is another remedy capable of establishing inflammation and suppuration and removes little foreign bodies that cannot be located.
Of course it is understood that if the physician knows the location of a splinter, he will take such steps as are necessary to remove it, and not wait for the action of a remedy. But at times a needle point breaks off against the bone of the finger of a seamstress, or small portions of the needle may exist where they cannot be found without an immense amount of slashing which the patient refuses. Hepar or Silica will remove it. A little abscess will form and the little mite will be discharged.
Knowing that these two remedies have this tendency to establish a suppuration wherever there are foreign bodies, it is well to be reminded that if a bullet were encysted in the lungs it would be well, if the symptoms called for Hepar or Silica, to consider whether it might not be injurious to give a remedy that would establish a suppuration. It might be that the bullet is resting in a vital place, in a net-work of arteries, and it would be well not to establish suppuration in this vital region.
Deposits, of a tubercular character are often located in a place that they can easily be suppurated out, and the action of the remedy on them would be the same as a foreign body. Hence it is that Hepar, after its administration, will very often abolish a crop of boils all over the economy because in the skin there are small accumulations of sebaceous matter and these will be suppurated out.
Sulphur also does this, so that it may be well to be careful and not give Silica or Sulphur, or Hepar too often, or too high, in patients that have encysted tubercle in the lungs. Rokitansky in his numerous post-mortems found a large number of encysted caseous deposits in the lungs, in cases that had lived and outgrown these trouble; they had become encysted and therefore perfectly safe and the patient had died of something else.
It might be dangerous to administer these medicines that have a tendency to cause suppuration in such, and you should at least proceed cautiously in using them. After you have seen a great many cases you will find that you have killed some of them. If our medicines were not powerful enough to kill folks, they would not be powerful enough to cure sick folks. It is well for you to realize that you are dealing with razors when dealing with high potencies.
I would rather be in a room with a dozen negroes slashing with razors than in the hands of ail ignorant prescriber of high potencies. They are means of tremendous harm, as well as of tremendous good.
In contrast with Hepar (although Hepar is a form of Calcarea), Calcarea carb. has no such tearing down nature in it. It does not establish inflammation around foreign bodies and tend to suppurate them but causes a fibrous deposit around bullets and other foreign, substances in the flesh. It causes tubercular deposits to harden and contract and become encysted.
Many excellent homoeopathic physicians have said to me,
“I do not agree with you as to the danger of Sulphur in phthisical cases. I have cured cases of phthisis with Sulphur.”
So have I many of them. But I did not refer to curable cases, but to those cases which are well developed and have gave symptoms. It is well to know all the elements in the case; then if you have administered a remedy and killed your patient, you know at least what you have done.
It is better to know what you have done if you have killed your patient, than to be ignorant of it and go on and kill some more in the same way.
In 1881, Kent accepted a position as professor of anatomy at the Homeopathic College of Missouri, an institution with which he remained affiliated until 1888. In 1890, Kent moved to Pennsylvania to take a position as Dean of Professors at the Post-Graduate Homeopathic Medical School of Philadelphia. In 1897 Kent published his magnum opus, Repertory of the Homœopathic Materia Medica. Kent moved to Chicago in 1903, where he taught at Hahnemann Medical College.
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