Psora is the beginning of all physical sickness. Had psora never been established as a miasm upon the human race, the other two chronic diseases would have been impossible, and susceptibility to acute diseases would have been impossible. All the diseases of man are built upon psora; hence it is the foundation of sickness; all other sickness came afterwards.
Psora is the underlying cause, and is the primitive or primary disorder of the human race. It is a disordered state of the internal economy of the human race. This state expresses itself in the forms of the varying chronic diseases, or chronic manifestations. If the human race had remained in a state of perfect order, psora could not have existed. The susceptibility to psora opens out a question altogether too broad to study among the sciences in a medical college.
It is altogether too extensive, for it goes to the very primitive wrong of the human race, the very first sickness of the human race, that is the spiritual sickness, from which first state the race progressed into what may be called the true susceptibility to psora, which in turn laid the foundation for other diseases.
If we regard psora as synonymous with itch, we fail to understand, and fail to express thereby, anything like the original intention of Hahnemann. The itch is commonly supposed to be a limited thing, something superficial, caused by a little tiny bit of a mite that is supposed to have life, and when the little itch mite is destroyed the cause of itch is said to have been removed. What a folly!
From a small beginning with wonderful progress, psora spreads out into its underlying states and manifests itself in the large portion of the chronic diseases upon the human race. It embraces epilepsy, insanity, the malignant diseases, tumors, ulcers, catarrhs, and a great proportion of the eruptions. It progresses from simple states to the very highest degree of complexity, not always alone and by itself, but often by the villainous aid of drugging during generation after generation; for the physician has endeavored with all his power to drive it from the surface, and has thereby caused it to root itself deeper, to become more dense and invisible, until the human race is almost threatened with extinction.
Look at the number of the population upon the face of the earth, and notice how few arrive at the age of maturity. It is appalling to think of the number of infants that die, and these largely from the outgrowths, or out-coming of psora. We see little ones born who have not sufficient vitality to live. The congenital debility, and marasmus, and varying diseases of a chronic character that carry off the little ones have for their underlying cause the chronic miasms. The principal underlying cause is psora, next syphilis and next sycosis.
It required twelve years for Hahnemann to discover and gather together the evidence upon which he came to his conclusions. When a patient came to him who manifested chronic disease in any way he took pains to write down carefully in detail all the symptoms, from beginning to end, with the history of the father and mother, until he had collected a great number of appearances of disease, not knowing yet what the outcome would be; but after this careful writing out of the symptoms of hundreds of patients, little and great, and comparing them and then gathering them together in one grand group, there appeared in the totality of this collection a picture of psora in all of its forms.
Up to this time the world had been looking upon each one of these varying forms as distinct in itself, e.g., all the striking features of epilepsy would be gathered together, and epilepsy was then called a disease; but epilepsy is only one of the results of disease, and never appears twice alike. Every person who has epilepsy differs from every other epileptic on earth. But epilepsy, insanity, diabetes, cancer, Bright’s disease, and every other case of so-called disease have all had a beginning and one beginning.
They are not distinct, but operate in each person in accordance with that individual. Hahnemann says that before he began that collection of symptoms he was struck somewhat with wonder that Nux Vomica and Ignatia and such short acting medicines were able to cure only a single manifestation of disease, a group of symptoms, or they would relieve for a time and then the symptoms would come back, although he had followed up the treatment to the best of his knowledge. At the end of a case, he could discover that there had been a continuous progress in spite of the fact that he had relieved his patient of suffering a good many times.
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.