When man is insane in his interior it is only a question of time and his body will take on the results of insanity because the interior of man forms the exterior. If the interior is insane the exterior is distorted, and is only suitable to the kind of insane or disordered life that dwells in it. False in the interior, false in the exterior, so that the body becomes, as it were, false. This is speaking from analogy, but you will come to see that it is actually true.
Each and everything that appears before the eyes is but the representative of its cause, and there is no cause except in the interior. Cause does not flow from the outermost of man to the interior, because man is protected against such a state of affairs. Causes exist in such subtle form that they cannot be seen by the eye. There is no disease that exists of which the cause is known to man by the eye or by the microscope.
Causes are infinitely too fine to be observed by any instrument of precision. They are so immaterial that they correspond to and operate upon the interior nature of man, and they are ultimated in the body in the form of tissue changes that are recognized by the eye. Such tissue changes must be understood as the results of disease only or the physician will never perceive what disease cause is, what disease is, what potentization is, or what the nature of life is. This is what Hahnemann meant when he speaks of the fundamental causes as existing in chronic miasms.
Just as soon as man lives a disorderly life he is susceptible to outside influences, and the more disorderly he lives the more susceptible he becomes to the atmosphere he lives in. When man thinks in a disorderly way he carries out his life in a disorderly way, and makes himself sick by disorderly habits of thinking and living. This deranged mental state Hahnemann most certainly recognizes, for he tells us everywhere in his teaching to pay most attention to the mental state. We must begin with such signs as represent to the mind the beginning of sickness, and this beginning will be found in the mental disorder as represented by signs and symptoms, and as it flows on we have the coarser manifestations of disease. The more that disease ultimates itself in the outward form the coarser it is and the less it points the physician to the remedy. The more mental it is the more signs there are to direct the physician to the remedy.
‘In these investigations the ascertainable physical constitution of the patient, etc., are to be taken into consideration”. This is the second state following the first following the first one disordered. This deals with the outermost, it relates to externals. You have to consider both the internal and external man; that is, you have to consider causes that operate in this disordered innermost, and then the ultimates which constitute the outward appearance, particularly when the affection is chronic. These two things must be considered, the nature or esse of the disease and its appearance.
At the present day diseases are named in the books from their appearance and not from any idea as to what the nature or esse of sickness is, hence the disease names in our books are misleading, as they do not have reference to the sick man but to ultimates. If the disease has terminated in the liver, numerous names are applied to the liver, if in the kidney or heart, these organs have names applied to them, and such terminations are called diseases. Consumption is a tubercular state of the lungs, which is but the result of an internal disorder which was operating in the interior long before the breakdown of tissue.
The physicians of these days will tell you that they go back to the cause, but they present no cause; they only bring up the superficial conditions that make the consumptive man worse. They will also tell you that a bacillus is the cause of tuberculosis. But if the man had not been susceptible to the bacillus he could not have been affected by it. As a matter of fact, the tubercules come first and the bacillus is secondary. It has never been found prior to the tubercule, but it follows that, comes then as a scavenger. The cause of the tubercular deposit rests with the psora, the chronic miasm. Bacilli are not the cause of disease, they never come until after the disease.
Allopaths are really taking the sequence for the consequence, thus leading to a false theory, the bacteria theory. You may destroy the bacteria and yet not destroy the disease. The susceptibility remains the same, and only those that are susceptible will take the disease. Bacteria have a use, for there is nothing in the whole world that does not have a use, and there is nothing sent on earth to destroy man. The bacteria theory would make it appear that the all-wise Creator has sent these micro-organisms here to make man sick. We see from this paragraph that Hahnemann did not adopt any such theory as bacteriology.
This subject will be taken up in these lectures and fully illustrated, but I might throw out a few hints to set you thinking until we come to it again. We know that a dissecting wound is very serious if the body dissected is recently dead, and this we would suppose to be due to some bacteria of wonderful power capable of establishing such a dreadful erysipelatous poisoning that would go into man’s blood and strike him down with a sort of septicaemia. In truth soon after death we have a ptomaine poison, the dead body poison, which is alkaloidal in character, but we do not yet discover the presence of bacteria. The poison is there, and if a man pricks himself while dissecting that body and does not take care of the wound he may have a serious illness and die. But if after the cadaver has remained some time and become infected with bacteria, the dissector pricks himself the wound is not dangerous.
The more bacteria the less poison. A typhoid stool when it first passes from the bowel has a very scanty allowance of bacteria, and yet it is very poisonous. But let it remain until it becomes black with bacteria and it is comparatively benign. Why does the poison not increase with the bacteria? You can potentize, as I have done, a portion of a tuberculous mass alive with tubercular bacilli, and after potentizing it, after being triturated with sugar of milk and mashed to a pulp, it will continue to manifest its symptoms in the most potent form.
You can precipitate the purulent tubercular fluid in alcohol, precipitate the entire animal life and potentize the supernatant fluid until you have reached the thirtieth potency, and having potentized or attenuated it until no microbe can be found, yet if administered to healthy man, it will establish the nature of the disease in the economy, which is prior to phthisis. Thus we have the cause of phthisis, not in the bacteria, but in the virus, which the bacteria are sent to destroy. Man lives longer with the bacteria than he would without them. If we could succeed today in putting a fluid into the economy that would destroy the bacteria that consumptive would soon die.
The study of disease as to fundamental cause and apparent cause is an important subject. We cannot study cause unless we have first understood government associated with law. Hence recall to your mind that the law directs and experience confirms. Law is nothing but an orderly state of government from centre to circumference, a government in which there is a head. You show me a company that has no captain and you show me a disorderly company. Order exists from the highest to the lowest from centre to circumference.
Now I have led up to the point where you may ask, Is it not disorder for man to settle what is true by the senses? Let us as homoeopaths turn our lives, our thinking abilities and our scientific life into order that we may begin to turn the human race into order. Let us adopt the plan of thinking of things from their beginning and following them in a series to their conclusions. No man is authority, but principle and law are authority.
If this cannot be seen there is no use of proceeding any further with the study of Homoeopathy. If man cannot see this he cannot see the necessity of harmony from centre to circumference, of government which has one head, and hence it would be useless for him to study the human body for the purpose of applying medicine to it. It must be accepted in this form or it will not satisfy man, it will not sustain his expectation, it will not do what he expects it to do; it will only accomplish what Allopathy has accomplished, viz., the establishment of confusion upon the economy.
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.