Whatever it is in medicine that heals the sick, nothing that represents the healing principle in each individual drug can ever be known but the symptoms obtained in healthy provers. The laboratory and microscope must ever fail, because these can discover only the ultimates, while the curative power is only a tendency, or conatus, of an invisible substance evolved into activities by circumstances. So long as men search in the laboratory for causes of disease, so long they will search in the laboratory for curative powers, which must always end in failure. (ORG. 24-2, 108.)
The study of the homoeopathic pathogenesis, which is so extensive, requires so much time and perseverance that men who are given to carelessness, indolence and levity, can do very little to make a showing for professional glory; hence the stupid, the flippant and the “smart” must always seek the material method and make it the basis of his efforts, thereby associating with, or placing himself on the same level as, the mechanic. Of course, all liquid substances seek their own level.
3. USE OF POTENCIES. APPLICATION OF REMEDIES TO SICKNESS.
And lastly, the physician must know how to adjust the one to the other, in order to gain the ends of healing. (ORG. 146 et seq.) Our pathogeneses have expanded into enormous proportions, so vast that no mind can encompass them, yet this once may be expanded very many times by a full knowledge of the uses of the various potencies. The physician who knows how to use the various potencies has ten times the advantage of the one that always uses one potency, no matter what that potency is.
After thirty years of careful observation and comparison with the use of the various potencies, it is possible to lay down the following rules:
Every physician should have at command the 30th, 200th, 1m, 10m, 50m, cm, dm and mm potencies, made carefully on the centesimal scale.
From the 30th to the 10m will be found those curative powers most useful in very sensitive women and children.
From the 10m to the mm all are useful for ordinary chronic diseases in persons not so sensitive.
In acute diseases the 1m and 10m are most useful.
In the sensitive women and children, it is well to give the 30th or 200th at first, permitting the patient to improve in a general way, after which the 1m may be used in similar manner. After improvement with that ceases, the 10m may be required.
In persons suffering from chronic sickness and not so sensitive, the 10m may first be used, and continued without change so long as improvement lasts; then the 50m will act precisely in the same manner, and should be used so long as the patient makes progress toward health; then the cm may be used in the same manner, and the dm and mm in succession. By this use of the series of potencies in a given case, the patient can be held under the influence of the similimum, or a given remedy, until cured. When the similimum is found, the remedy will act curatively in a series of potencies. If the remedy is only partially similar, it will act in only one or two potencies; then the symptoms will change and a new remedy will be demanded.
Many chronic cases will require a series of carefully selected remedies to effect a cure, if the remedy is only partially similar; but the ideal in prescribing is to find that remedy similar enough to hold the case through a full series to the highest. Each time the patient will say that the new potency acted as did the first one received. The patient can feel the medicine when it is acting properly. Some have intimated that suggestion is a help to the action of the remedy;, but it is wise to know that suggestion fails when the wrong remedy has been given.
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.