In a footnote to paragraph 7, Hahnemann writes: It is not necessary to say that every intelligent physicians would first remove this exciting or maintaining cause (causa occasionalis), where it exists; the indisposition thereupon generally ceases spontaneously.
You have, I believe, been led to conclude that there are apparent diseases, which are not diseases, but disturbed states that may be called indispositions. A psoric individual has his periods of indispositions from external causes, but these external causes do not inflict psora upon him. Such a patient may disorder his stomach from abusing it and thus create an indisposition. Indispositions from external causes mimic the miasms, i.e., their group of symptoms is an imitation of a miasmatic manifestation, but the removal of the external cause is likely to restore the patient to health.
Business failures, depressing tribulations, unrequited affection producing suffering in young girls, are apparent causes of disease, but in reality they are only exciting causes of indispositions. The active cause is within and the apparent cause of sickness is without. if man had no psora, no deep miasmatic influence within his economy, he would be able to throw off all these business cares, he would not become insane from business depression and the young girl would not suffer so from love affairs. There would be an orderly state. The physician then must discriminate between the causes that are apparent or external, the grosser things, from the truer causes of disease, which are from centre to circumference.
In every instance where Hahnemann speaks of true sickness, he speaks of its as a miasmatic disease, but here he employs another word. “Then the indisposition usually yields of itself,” or if the psoric condition has been somewhat disturbed, order can be restored by a few doses of the homoeopathic remedy. To illustrate, if a man has disordered his stomach it will right itself on his ceasing to abuse it; but, if the trouble seems somewhat prolonged, a dose of medicine, like Nux vomica or whatever remedy is indicated, will help the stomach to right itself, and so long as he lives in an orderly way he will cease to feel this indisposition.
“The physician will remove from the room strong smelling flowers which have a tendency to cause syncope and hysterical sufferings.” There are some nervous girls who are so sensitive to flowers that they will faint from the odor. There are other individuals who are so psoric in their nature that they cannot live in the ordinary atmosphere; some must be sent to the mountains some to warm lands, some to cold lands. This is removing the occasioning cause, the apparent aggravating cause of suffering.
A consumptive in the advanced stages, one who is steadily running down in Philadelphia, must be sent to a climate where he can be made comfortable. The external or apparent cause, the disturbing cause in his sick state, is thus removed but the cause of his sickness is prior to this. The physician does not send the patient away for the purpose of curing him, but for the purpose of making him comfortable. “He will extract from the cornea the foreign body that excites inflammation of the eye, loosen the overtight bandage on a wounded limb that threatens to cause mortifications, lay bare and put a ligature on the wounded artery that produces fainting, endeavour to promote the expulsion by vomiting of belladonna berries, etc., that may have been swallowed. Now, without the circumstances and surroundings in which Hahnemann stated these things, it has been asserted in the public prints that Hahnemann advised emetics. A class of so- called physicians have taken this note of Hahnemann’s for a cloak as a means of covering up their scientific rascality, their use of external applications. They tell us Hahnemann said so, but we see it becomes a lie.
Here is another note: :”In all times, the old school physicians. not knowing how else to give relief, have sought to combat and if possible to suppress by medicines, here and there a single symptom form among a number in diseases.’ This course of singling out a group of symptoms, and treating that group alone as the disease is incorrect, because it has no due relation to the entirety of the man.
A group of symptoms may arise through the uterus and vagina, and one who is of this understanding has a plan for removing only the group of symptoms that belong to his speciality, whereby he thinks he has eradicated the trouble. Hahnemann condemns this doctrine, and we see at once its great folly. In many instances there are, at the same time, manifestations of “heart disease,’ “liver disease,” etc. (that is, speaking in their terms; these are not diseases at all, as we know), so that every specialist might be consulted, and each one would direct the assault at his own particular region, and so the patient goes the rounds of all the specialists and the poor man dies. An old allopathic physician once made the remark about a case of pneumonia that he was treating, that he had broken up the pneumonia. “Yes,” said another physician, ‘the pneumonia is cured, but the patient is going to die.”
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.