ONLY DERANGED AND CURED IN DYNAMIC PLANES
Organon $ 16. Our vital force, as a spirit-like dynamics, cannot be attacked and infected by injurious influences on the healthy organism caused by the external inimical forces that disturbs the harmonious play of life otherwise than in a spirit-like (dynamic) way, and in like manner all such morbid derangements (diseases) cannot be removed from it by the physician in any other way than by the spirit-like (dynamic, virtual) alternative powers of the serviceable medicines acting upon our spirit-like vital force, which preserves them through the medium of the sentient faculty of the nerves everywhere present in the organism, so that it is only by their dynamic action of the vital force that remedies are able to re-establish and actually re-establish health and vital harmony after the changes in the health of the patient cognizable by our senses (the totality of the symptoms) have revealed the disease to the carefully observing and investigating physician as fully as was requisite in order to enable him to cure it.
The 16th paragraph furnishes the subjects that we will talk about this morning. It treats of three states: (1) of the state of health, or the normal activities of the body,. (2) of how that state is made sick or turned into disorder, and (3) of how that disordered state can be turned into health. If we could find a man in a state of perfect health, we might subject him to shock, to injuries, to the actions of the cruder things around us, and he would pass through them or they would pass away without leaving upon him any such thing as a disorder. He might be under the influence of that shock a short time, but when reaction came, if it came at all, it would leave him free from miasm, he would not have therefrom either an acute or chronic disease. It is only by the action of immaterial substances, simple substance acting upon a plane similar to the plane of his susceptibility, that he can become infected with a sickness; that is, the resultant action of a substance capable of operating from his innermost two his outermost, and establishing evidence which we call symptoms. If the outermost alone is acted upon the vital force of the man is only temporarily disturbed., but there is not established a definite disorder (not even a limited one) that can run a course with a beginning, a period of progress and decline, such as the miasmas do.
Whatever depresses the tissues of man, or his bodily functions, only acts temporarily, and is not capable of establishing a true disease. Take, for instance, the cruder drugs that we see used as a physic. You may give the patient the coarser and cruder forms of drugs as purgatives and emetics, and he will go through the shock and return to his original state. It is only after the most violent and long continued use of liquids that there can be implanted upon him a drug disease, and even that is largely superficial in comparison to a natural diseased condition. The constant use of Bromide of Potassium will produce effects in time, but that drug does not go to the depths, it operates upon the tissue, producing the coarser form of disease, but not miasmatic in characters.
Take also the coarser poisons as an example. Many of them can be taken into the stomach in crude form with very little manifestation upon the vital force, indeed the more active and virulent and condensed the poison the smaller the collective symptoms image. The small pox crust can be swallowed and it will be digested and very little trouble come from it, but the inhalation of the atmosphere that contains the aura of smallpox upon a plane corresponding to the susceptibility of the individual will bring him down with the disease having a definite prodrome, a period of progress and a period of decline, showing that the very foundation of the man’s nature has been struck. Such as operation is upon the internals of man upon his invisible, immaterial substances, and it operates from within out, producing ultimate in his tissues, establishing results upon the skin.
Hahnemann in this paragraph affirms that nothing, except in the form of a simple substance, can so implant itself upon the economy as to run its course as a disease either acute or chronic. No disease can implant itself upon the economy through its ultimate forms; only in its invisible forms can it so act. All diseases known to man are in the form of simple substance, an invisible something that cannot be detected by the chemist or the microscopist, and will never be detected in the natural world. Disease cause is known, and known only, from its effects; it is not capable of investigation by the natural senses and can only be investigated as to its results. Everything that can be seen, felt or observed, or detected with the microscope, is but an ultimate, a result. It is only by the understanding, by reasoning from first to last and then back again, that we can perceive that disease causes are invisible.
The body can be affected, the tissues can be affected, and ultimate can be affected by ultimates, there can be friction between ultimates things in this world can collide with other things in this world and they may destroy each other; ultimates may destroy ultimates; but such a thing as diseases occurring in ultimates except through dynamic changes is impossible
Nor can any agency which is an ultimate act upon the human economy curatively, turning into vital order the innermost of life. Vital disorder cannot be turned into order except by something similar in quality to the vital force. It is not similitude in quantity that we want, in weights and measures, but it is similarity in quality, in power, in plane, that must be sought for.
Medicines, therefore, cannot affect the high and interior planes of the physical economy unless they are raised to the plane of similarity in quality. The individual who needs Sulphur in the very highest degrees may take Sulphur sufficient to move his bowels, may rub it upon the skin, may wear it in his stockings, can take Sulphur baths, all without effect upon his disease. In that form the drug is not in correspondence with his sickness. it does not affect him in the same plane in which he is sick, and so it cannot affect the cause and flow from thence to the circumference, So with all the coarser drugs, they do not cure.
We sometimes see the outermost effects of disease, disease located in the outer planes, temporarily removed by the lower potencies and crude drugs, but it is only as to the exteriors and ultimates that the cure is effected, and as it does not reach the innermost degree it is not permanent. In acute diseases also crude drugs sometimes accomplish their purpose, because the outermost which they affect is only on the surface and the innermost has, in acute, disease, the tendency to go away of itself; if his life can simply be spared until the diseases has run its course the patient will recover. But the chronic miasmas are only reached as to their ultimate symptoms, and these are caused to subside only temporarily or are suppressed by the action of the crude or ultimate forms of medicine.
I look back upon the time when my own mind was in a cloud as to his subject, and if I refer to it here it may be of use to you I remember when I first read from Hahnemann that potentized medicines would cure he sick that it seemed to me a mystery. I had no knowledge upon which to found beliefs in such things,. I began to practice with the lower potencies and with crude drugs in attempting to carry out the law, but with these means I was able to cure only superficial complaints. My work was far from satisfactory, yet it was somewhat better than the old things., it was milder than psyching and purging and emesis. Of course I rested upon my opinions and belief for my knowledge. everyone does that.
Later I resolved to test the 30th potency to see if there was not yet medicine in it, and I prepared with my own hands the 30th potency of Podophyllum with water on the centesimal scale, after the fashion of Hahnemann, having been told that water was as good as alcohol and it was only the attenuation that was required. This was during an epidemic of diarrhoea that looked like Podophyllum, but I had not the courage to give the 30th and still continued to use my stronger medicines.
One day a child was brought into my office in the mother’s arms. She brought it in hastily, and it did not seem as if it could live long. It was an infant, and while it lay in her arms a thin yellowish fecal stool ran over my carpet. The odor struck me as like that I had been reading about as the odor of the Podophyllum stool; it was horribly offensive, stinking, and the stoll was so copious that the mother made the remark that she did not know where it all came from. I said to myself, this is a case upon which to rest Hahnemann’s 30th potency. So I fixed up some of the Podophyllum 30 and put it on the child’s tongue and sent the mother home, fearing that the child would soon die, as it was very ill, face pinched and drawn, cadaveric, and had a dreadful odor about it. Next morning when making my rounds I had to pass the house.
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.