There are some generals that relate to this disease under homoeopathic treatment. It can be found from books what to expect in this disease; for instance, the different syphilitic eruptions in all their varied manifestations as to time and color.
In regard to the prodromal period, it is well to remember that it is usually from twelve to fifteen days, but it is sometimes as late as 50 or 60 days. Some acute miasm or a bad cold, or a drug disturbing the economy, may prevent the external manifestations and prolong the prodromal period, but it is usually from 12-15 days, if in no way disturbed or interrupted. Now the prodromal period increases with the contagion of the various stages. This is an observation that you will be able to verify in homoeopathic practice but one that the books will not give.
The books speak of the primary contagion as the only contagion in connection with the syphilitic miasm, but let me tell you something. Suppose we assume that the syphilitic miasm is a disease that would run for a definite time, and suppose that an individual has gone through with the primary manifestation and is told by his physician that the he can safely marry, his wife becomes an invalid; but she does not go through the primary manifestations, the initial lesion and the roseola, but she has the syphiloderma and the symptoms which belong to the later stage of the disease.
This disease is transferred from husband to wife, and it is taken up in the stage in which it then exists and from thence goes on in a progressive way. The woman catches it from the man in the stage in which he has it at the time of their marriage; she takes that which he has; if he has it in the advanced stage she takes it in that stage; she takes from him the stage he has to offer.
This is equally true of psora and sycosis. Such things never occur in the acute miasm, but the three chronic miasms have contagion in the form in which they exist at the time. The state is transferred, so that one in the advanced stages of psora will transfer to his good wife the psora which he has, and she takes it up and progress with it and adds it to her own, and it progresses in with her peculiarities.
But the law of protection by dissimilars often comes in here and saves the wife’s system from receiving a new infection of either syphilis, psora or sycosis. The disorders already present in her economy may be so wholly dissimilar that they protect her from contagion. This it is that a woman may have coition with a man that has sycosis in the form of gleet, and yet not have it indicated upon her; thus she may have protection against form of chancre. She may remain in contact with him as wife, and even have a child by him, and that child be black with syphilis, while she has no symptoms of syphilis. The reason of that is that the child is from the seed of the father and the mother only furnishes the groundwork.
There are plenty of physiological facts that demonstrate these things. I have seen several cases where the child was born black with syphilis, and have looked for the mother to come down with syphilis symptoms, but no trace of it could be observed. When infection takes place in the primary stage there is no way of disguising it, but if it occurs in the secondary or tertiary stage there is really no way of detecting it immediately, because it goes on insidiously.
If the husband has the primary sore primary sore will manifest itself in the wife, but if he gives the disease to his wife in the tertiary stage, with every manifestation suppressed or passed by, then you will not be able to know whether she has taken the disease or not. We have already seen in studying the Organon that when the disease are dissimilar to each other one repels the other; so that if the woman has something in her economy in the form of a chronic disease, perhaps a phthisical condition, she will be protected.
The organic results are such that the body is overwhelmed with the disease that it already has, and hence she is protected. Dissimilars repel each other, and similars attract and cure each other. Yet if the dissimilar psoric manifestation is of a milder type, and can be substituted by the contagion, then the syphilitic condition comes in. To know the action of diseases upon each other is essential, because we see the principle of cure in how one disease affects another.
We learn much concerning the syphilitic miasm under the action of homoeopathic remedies. At the end of the prodromal period we may expect the chancre; at the end of about six weeks, more or less, we may expect the external manifestations, the roseola and other eruptions; soon succeeding these, at the time of their disappearance, or in connection with them, we have the mucous patches in the throat, ulcers in the throat, and finally the falling of the hair. These rapidly succeed each other, often being associated. These are the commonest outward manifestation of the earlier period of secondary syphilis, it is important to remember this.
In weakly subjects these come on very feeble; in robust, vigorous constitutions these manifestations come on vigorously. Now it matters not whether the feeble constitution fails to throw these out, or whether because of drugs the constitution has been made feeble and thereby the manifestations are withdrawn when they been thrown out. The state is the same, whether they are suppressed or with-held because of the feeble constitution, i.e., the disease is operating upon the internal, having a tendency to affect the organs that are of the interior man, the brain, the liver, the kidneys, the spleen, the heart and the lungs, the tissue and the bones.
As syphilis commences to occupy the interior tissues of man the periosteum, the bone and the brain are tissues that are sought out as the principal sites. If you will contrast that with psora you will see that the latter more commonly attacks the blood vessels and the liver and causes deposits beneath the skin, forming suppuration and boils. The syphilitic boil is not a true boil, it is a multiple tubercular mass most vicious in character.
If we observe the syphilitic miasm in its backward progress we will trace it back in its stages, supposing they had been suppressed. In the earlier state the homoeopathic treatment strikes at the root of the evil, and will take hold of that which would become latent, and will so turn things into order that the chance that is painful will become painless, will continue on as a mild and harmless sore. The bubo will be hastened to suppuration when it would not otherwise suppurate. The mucous patches will be checked, the sore throat will be greatly relieved, so that the patient is made more comfortable in all of his manifestations. In this earlier state we do not see the backward progress in the form of ulcers, etc., but we see that the tendency of the homoeopathic remedy is, as it were, to quiet manifestations or subdue them, until the remedy has taken a deep and permanent hold of the economy, then they gradually subside.
So much for the action of homoeopathic remedies upon earlier manifestations. But now if we proceed to examine the very latest manifestations we will see an opposite state. If you take hold of a case that is very late, say an old case that has been five years going the rounds, getting all sorts of vicious treatment, and the patient has those awful biparietal head pains, he is becoming weaker in mind, he is getting the tertiary manifestations in general, tendency to gummatous formations and deep-seated ulcerations, and is threatening to break down in health.
You will find constitutional remedies can only restore him and cure him by bringing out external manifestations upon his body somewhere. Not that the primary sore will come back right away; he may never have it at all; but he will begin to have ulcerated sore throat, which may progress and eat all the soft tissues in view, including the soft palate. If this ulceration appears the bones that have been so painful and threatened to become necrosed will cease to be affected; the periostitis will subside. Iritis is likely to be a troublesome symptom and may come with the secondary symptoms, or long years afterwards with tertiary symptoms.
The proper remedy will immediately relieve this last appearing symptom, but the patient will say : “Doctor, I wish you would look in my throat; I have not had this trouble for a long time.” You see upon examining his throat a mucous membrane that has been sacrificed by the application of Nitric acid and other caustics, indurated, hard, gristly-like tissues that are infiltrated with gummatous deposits. Now, he is in a pickle, for just as sure as he lives that man will have to undergo much trouble if you save him from insanity. If you save him at all, so that he is worth living, these suppressed manifestations must come back, and they will come back under appropriate treatment.
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.