The real sick man is prior to the sick body and we must conclude that the sick man be somewhere in that portion which is not left behind. That which is carried away is primary and that which is left behind is ultimate. We say the man feels, sees, tastes, hears, he thinks and he lives, but these are only outward manifestations of thinking and living. The man wills and understands; the cadaver does not will and does not understand; then that which takes its departure is that which knows and wills. It is that which can be changed and is prior to the body.
The combination of these two, the will and the understanding, constitute man; conjoined they make life and activity, they manufacture the body and cause all things of the body. With the will and understanding operating in order we have a healthy man. It is not our purpose to go behind the will and the understanding, to go prior to these. It is enough to say that they were created. Then man is the will and the understanding, and the house which he lives in is his body.
We must, to be scientific homoeopaths, recognize that he muscles, the nerves, the ligaments and the other parts of man’s frame are a picture and manifest to the intelligent physician the internal man. Both the dead and the living body are to be considered, not from the body to the life, but from the life to the body. If you were to describe the difference between two human faces, their character and everything you observe of their action, you would be describing scarcely more than the will. The will is expressed in the face; its result is implanted on the countenance.
Have you ever studied the face of an individual who has grown up a murderer or villain of some sort? Is there no difference between his face and that of one who has the will to do good, to live uprightly? Go down into the lowest parts of our great city and study the faces of these people. These people are night prowlers; they are up late at night studying villainy. If we inquire into it we will see that their affections are of that kind. They have the stamp upon their faces. They have evil affections and an evil face. The countenance then is expressive of the heart. Allopathic pathology recognizes nothing but man’s body. Yet one can easily confuse the allopath by asking him what man’s thought is, what man is. The homoeopath must master these things before he can perceive the nature of the cause of disease and before he can understand what cure is.
It is the sole duty of the physician to heal the sick. It is not his sole duty to heal the results of sickness, but the sickness itself. When the man himself has been restored to health, there will be restored harmony in the tissues and in the activities. Then the sole duty of the physician is to put in order the interior of the economy, i.e., the will and understanding conjoined. Tissue changes are of the body and are the results of disease. They are not the disease Hahnemann once said, “There are no diseases, but sick people,” from which it is clear that Hahnemann understood that the diseases so-called, e.g., Bright’s disease, liver disease, etc. were but the grosser forms of disease results, viz., appearances of disease. There is first disorder of government, and this proceeds from within outward until we have pathological changes in the tissues. In the practice of medicine today the idea of government is not found, and the tissue changes only are taken into account.
He who considers disease results to be the disease itself, and expects to do away with these as disease, is insane. It is an insanity in medicine, an insanity that has grown out of the milder forms of mental disorder in science, crazy whims. The bacteria are results of disease. In the course of time we will be able to show perfectly that the microscopical little fellows are not the disease cause, but that they come after, that they are scavengers accompanying the disease, and that they are perfectly harmless in every respect.
They are the outcome of the disease, are present wherever the disease is, and by the microscope it has been discovered that every pathological result has its corresponding bacteria. The Old School consider these the cause, but we will be able to show that disease cause is much more subtle than anything that can be shown by a microscope. We will be able to show you by a process of reasoning, step by step, the folly of hunting for disease cause by the implements of the senses.
In a note Hahnemann says: “The physician’s mission is not, however, to construct so-called systems, by interweaving empty speculations and hypotheses concerning the internal essential nature of the vital processes and the mode in which diseases originate in the invisible interior of the organism,” etc. We know that in the present day people are perfectly satisfied if they can find the name of the disease they are supposed to have, an idea cloaked in some wonderful technically.
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.