Totality of Symptoms



You might easily suppose, but the way the modern firms bring their medicines before us, that they have by a great effort of their will, and by great meditation, thought out what these drugs will of medicine at the present time I very often listen patiently to a drummer from some of the New York houses. He will speak his piece, tell what this wonderful combination will do, how many diseases it will cure, and then I ask him how he finds this out. “Oh, the doctors say so. Here are the testimonials.” “But how do they find it out?” “Oh, they use them.”

But the drugs have not been proved, and their use is not in accordance with what the homoeopath knows the drugs will produce or cure. If you go into a friendly drug store and talk with the druggist you will find these medicines which have been conducted in the prescriptions of all the fashionable doctors in the neighbourhood. In six months from that time if you go to that same store you will not find one of those drugs in use, but a new set following the visit of the travelling man who has come around to represent their wonderful properties.

Do not think that I refer entirely to the old school, because a large percentage of these prescriptions is from professed Homoeopaths, and that is as much Homoeopaths do these things, attempting to establish a Homoeopathic practice upon an allopathic foundation. They try to become fashionable and change their prescriptions as the ladies change their bonnets with the season.

In $20 Hahnemann says:

This spirit-like power to alter man’s state of health (and hence to cure diseases) which lies hidden in the inner nature of medicine can never be discovered by us by a mere effort of reason; it is only by experience of the phenomena it displays when acting in the state of health of man that we can become clearly cognizant of it.

There is only one way of findings out what Aconite will do to the economy, and that is to give it to many men and note the symptoms that these men experience as the manifestations of Aconite It is first necessary to know that drugs can make man sick, and next to know what that state of sickness is. Every medicine that a homoeopath uses should have been thoroughly proven upon the healthy so that its symptom image shall have been thoroughly brought out.

It is a burning shame upon the Homoeopathic profession that so large a number of drugs exist in the homoeopathic pharmacies, and that these drugs are recommended for such and such diseases without any investigation as to their properties,. other than perhaps that Dr. So-and-So on the recommendation of some old woman, has used this or that drug for dropsy. Such a thing is positively condemned in every line of the Organon and by every doctrine. There is no principle in it, it is unscientific, and unworthy of the vocation of a doctor.

Every drug must be thoroughly proven upon the healthy. In our study of the Materia Medica I do not encumber you with partially proved drugs. We can study these after we have studied those that have been well proved. The “Guiding Symptoms” contain many medicines only partially proven, and it is often a matter of accident when cures are made with them. But the old remedies that have been handed down from the masters, and that have had years of trial, come to us as friends which we can learn of and become acquainted with.

You cannot become acquainted with unproved drugs. When books tell you that a drug is food for this or that pay no attention to them, but when a book tells you that a drug has produced such and such symptoms study these; that is a piece of valuable information. The old school Materia Medica is made up of the results of medicine upon sickness, an unscientific guide, a fluctuating scale.

James Tyler Kent
James Tyler Kent (1849–1916) was an American physician. Prior to his involvement with homeopathy, Kent had practiced conventional medicine in St. Louis, Missouri. He discovered and "converted" to homeopathy as a result of his wife's recovery from a serious ailment using homeopathic methods.
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.