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.”
That is the way when one of these groups of symptoms is removed; constipation may be removed by physic; liver symptoms may sometimes be removed temporarily by a big dose of calomel; ulcers can be so stimulated that they will heal up; but the patient is not cured. Hahnemann says it is strange that the physician cannot see that the removal of these symptoms is not followed by cure, that the patient is worse off for it.
Some patients are not sufficiently ill to see immediately the bad consequences of the closure of a fistulous opening but if a patient is threatened with phthisis, or is a weakly patient, the closure of that fistulous opening of the anus will throw him into a flame of excitement and will cause his death in a year or two. The more rugged ones will live a number of years before they break down. and they are held up as evidences of cure.
Such treatment is not based upon principles, and close observation will convince a thoughtful man of its uselessness and danger. The fistulous opening came there because it was of use, and probably if it had been permitted to exist would have remained as a vent until the patient was cured. When the patient is cured the fistulous opening ceases to be of use, the necessity for it to remain open has ceased and it heals up of itself.
The Organon condemns on principle the removal of external manifestations of disease by an external means whatever. A psoric case is one in which there is no external or traumatic cause. The patient perhaps has the habit of living as nearly an orderly life as it is possible for anyone to assume at the present day, going the regular rounds of service, using coffee and tea not at all or only in small quantity, careful in diet, removing all external things which are the cause of indispositions,. and yet this patient remains sick.
The signs and symptoms that are manifested are the true impress of nature, they constitute the outwardly reflected image of the inward nature of the sickness. “Now as in a disease from which n manifest exciting or maintaining cause has to be removed we can perceive nothing but the morbid symptoms, it must be the symptoms alone by which the disease demands and points to the remedy suited to relieve it.”
Hahnemann’s teaching is that there is a use in this symptom image, and that every curable disease presents itself to the intelligent physician in the signs and symptoms that he can perceive. In viewing a long array of symptoms an image is presented to the mind of an internal disorder, and this is all that the intelligent physician can rely upon for the purpose of cure.
This divides Homoeopathy into two parts, the science Homoeopathy and the art of Homoeopathy. The science treats of the knowledges relating to the doctrines of cure, the knowledge of principle or order, which you may say is physiology; the knowledge of disorder in the human economy, which is pathology (that is, the science of disease, not morbid anatomy), and the knowledge of cure.
The science of Homoeopathy is first to be learned to prepare one for the application of that science, which is the art of Homoeopathy. If we cast our eyes over those who have been taught, self-taught or otherwise, we see that some can learn the science, become quite famous and pass excellent examinations, and are utterly unable to apply the science, or, in other words, to practice the art of healing, for all healing consists in making application of the science.
We study disease as a disorder of the human economy in the symptoms of the disease itself. We also study disease from the symptoms of medicines that have caused disorder in the economy. Indeed, we can study the nature and quality of disease as much by studying the Materia Medica as by studying symptoms of disease, and when we cannot fill our time in studying symptoms from sick folks it is well to use the time in studying the symptomatology of the Materia Medica.
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.