158. “This trifling homoeopathic aggravation of the malady during the first few hours, the happy omen which announces that the acute disease will soon be cured, and that it will, for the most part, yield to a first dose.” That a natural disease can destroy another by exceeding it in power and intensity, but above all things by its similarity, is the whole truth and nothing but the truth. So that when this slight aggravation occurs you will seldom, if ever, have to give another dose in an acute disease. When this aggravation does not come, when there is not the slightest aggravation of the symptoms, and the patient appears to be gradually better after the remedy, then it is that relief may cease in the case of an acute disease, and when that relief ceases the reaction has ceased and then another dose of medicine is correct practice.
Relief that begins without any aggravation of the symptoms, does not last so long in an acute disease as when an aggravation has taken place. A slight action of the remedy over and above the disease is a good sign. Again, you will find if your remedy was not perfectly similar you will not get an aggravation except in oversensitive patients, and then it is a medicinal aggravation.
When you find that you get no aggravation of the symptoms in a good vigorous constitutions, none at all, very often your remedy has been only partially similar and it may require two or three of such partially similar remedies to finish the case. If you will observe the work of ordinary physician, you will notice they give two or three remedies to get their patients through where a master gives but one.
159. “The smaller the dose of the Homoeopathic remedy, the slighter the apparent aggravation of the disease, and it is proportionately of shorter duration.” This was written at the time of Hahnemann’s experience with what might be called small doses, ranging from the lower potencies to the 30th and seldom much higher. He had had ample experience with the 30th, and occasionally with 60th, but not with tremendous turmoil that comes from the very highest attenuations.
It reads in the correct translation of this (this is incorrect here) : “The smaller the dose is of the homoeopathic medicine, the less and the shorter is the aggravation in the first hours.” It might be considered to mean an apparent aggravation, or an apparent aggravation of the disease. Now Hahnemann observes, as you will find amongst several of his writings, that the disease itself is actually intensified and made worse by the remedy, if the remedy be precisely similar, but if we pass away from the crudity of the medicines, ranging up towards the 30th potency, we get a milder action, and it has a deeper curative action, and the smaller the dose of the homoeopathic medicine the less and the shorter is the aggravation. The idea is that there is an aggravation in the first hours; that is a matter that the paragraph itself admits, and it is this aggravation that Hahnemann is talking about.
It is sometimes true that after the third or fourth potencies of Belladonna in a violent congestion of the brain, the aggravation is violent, and if the medicine is not discontinued the child will die. The disease itself appears to be aggravated, the child seems to be so susceptible to Belladonna that it appears as if were to be added to the disease, but with the 30th potency, as Hahnemann observes, this aggravation is slight and of short duration. Now, in this we get an outside aggravation. It is the drug disease of the remedy added to the natural disease, an aggravated state of the disease caused by the drug. It is true sometimes, in spite of this aggravation, that the patient says somehow or other he feels better.
This aggravation is unnecessarily prolonged by giving too low potencies; it is also prolonged by a repetition of the dose. I recently observed a state that occured from repetition. I sent a very robust young woman, twenty years old, a dose of Bryonia, to be taken dry on the tongue. However, she dissolved it in water, and was taking it at the end of the second day, when I was sent for, at which time she seemed to be going into pneumonia. She had a dry, harsh cough. “What is the matter with my daughter, doctor, is she going to die?” She was proving Bryonia. I stopped the Bryonia, and next morning she was well. This has been seen a great many times when the medicine was similar. If the medicine is not very similar, only partially similar it yet may be similar enough to cure, but you will not see the results that I am now speaking of; but when you make accurate prescriptions, and are doing your best work, you will see these things in the very best constitutions.
Of course, the explanation is that the patient is as sensitive to the medicine that will cure her as to the disease that she has. Diseased states, then, are made worse by unnecessary repetition and by the dose not being small enough, that is, by the dose being very crude. The third, fourth and sixth are dangerous potencies, if you are a good prescriber, If you are a poor prescriber, you will demonstrate but little of anything. You will naturally go to the higher and higher potencies for the purpose of departing from what seems to be a poisonous dose.
This action differs from the aggravation of a c.m. potency, during the latter the patient feels decidedly better. It is short, it is decisive, and only the characteristic symptoms of the disease are aggravated. The disease itself is not aggravated; the disease itself is not added to, and is not intensified, but the symptoms of the disease stand out sharply and the patient says, “I am getting better.” The symptoms sometimes are a little alarming, but intermingled with this is a ray of light that convinces the patient from his innermost feelings that he is getting better. “I feel much better this morning,” says the patient, though the symptoms may have been sharpened up.
160. We are accused nowadays of having departed from Hahnemann. Hahnemann wrote of the 30th potency in one of the stage of his life, as sufficiently high and sufficiently low. We can easily see that it was in the earlier period of his investigations that he made the remark that potentizing must end somewhere. we are accused of departing from Hahnemann, because we give different doses from what Hahnemann gave. Now I want to show you that this is not so.
Read paragraph 279: “It has been fully proved by pure experiments that when a disease does not evidently depend upon the impaired state of an important organ the dose depend of the homoeopathic remedy can never be sufficiently small so as to be inferior to the power of the natural disease which it can, at least, partially extinguish and cure, provided it be capable of producing only a small increase of symptoms immediately after it is administered.”
Now, if we go to the 200th potency and find that that will aggravate, if we go to the 50m. and find that that will aggravate, if we go to the cm., the mm., etc., and find that they will aggravate that they still have the power to intensify the symptoms, the remedy has just the same curative power in it. If we have the potency so high that it is not capable of producing an aggravation of the symptoms, we may then be sure that there is no medicinal power left. We are up to the 13mm. and the end is not yet.
Now we have never made the claim that every potency will suit everybody. The potency must correspond to the state of the patient. If we ever find a person who will be aggravated in his symptoms in the most positive and definite fashion, that potency will be verified. We have not departed from Hahnemann, but have acted in accordance with his doctrines.
280. “This incontrovertible axiom, founded upon experience, will serve as a rule by which the doses of all homoeopathic medicines, without exception, are to be attenuated to such a degree, that after being introduced into the body they shall merely produce an almost insensible aggravation of the disease. It is of little importance whether the attenuation goes so far as to appear almost impossible to ordinary physicians whose minds feed on no other ideas but what are gross and material. All these arguments and vain assertions will be of little avail when opposed to the doctrines of unerring experience.”
Now, can there be any doubt of what Hahnemann meant when he speaks of the smallest dose? Can there be any doubt but that he means attenuation, and attenuation up and up until we reach that point in the attenuation that we do not observe a slight aggravation of the symptoms? In the note to paragraph 249, he says, “All experience teaches us that scarcely any homoeopathic medicine can be prepared in too minute a dose to produce perceptible benefit in a disease to which it is adapted. Hence, it would be an improper and an injurious practice when the medicine produces no good effect or an inconsiderable aggravation of the symptoms, after the manner of the old school to repeat or increase the dose under the ideas that it cannot prove serviceable on account of its minuteness.“
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.