The specialist assumes, and no doubt believes, that the chronic complaints and symptoms of human beings are due to the disordered condition of the particular organ which he has selected as his particular speciality. The gynecologist tells the woman that all her suffering in the various organs and parts of the body are due to the disordered pelvic organs. The cardiac specialist tells her that all her complaints are due to her heart. The oculist tells her that all her troubles are due to the eyes. The neurologist tells her that all her troubles are due to the spine. Each one promises that the patient will be well when the organ which he treats has been properly treated.
It would appear that this perverted idea of the specialist prevents him from ever learning to be a successful homoeopathic physician. It appears never to have dawned upon one of them that the organs are sick and out of order because the patient is sick. Each specialist gives local treatment to the part that is his specialty, if he can get to it to treat it locally. If he cannot reach it with local treatment, he feeds the patient with drugs, supposed to act upon such organ, in physiological doses.
THE LOCAL TREATMENT OF NOSE AND THROAT, VAGINA, EYE AND EAR, IS NO DOUBT THE MOST DANGEROUS OF ALL THE WORK DONE BY SPECIALISTS.
The specialists appear to think that all there is to be learned about the human body is the anatomy, pathology, and local treatment of the part selected. With the exception of a few specialists who do not work in this way, it is evident that more harm comes thus to human beings than the homoeopath can counteract.
Any homoeopathist who does careful and honest prescribing will have constantly on hand a lot of patients who have had discharges from ear, vagina, or eyes, suppressed by local use of strong drugs. If the specialist would only consider first the patient as a whole, while he is advising about the part that he has pre-emptied as his own, and cease using the strong lotions, he would be a useful man, but he then would only be a physician and seldom a specialist.
The smallest part of the body should never be treated except by a remedy that fits the symptoms of the entire constitution, organs and parts. It is a complete loss, if not a damage, to a patient to take a remedy for the eye, unless it fits all the symptoms of the mind, body and parts, yet we cannot object to a physician choosing to be a specialist if first of all he is an all-round physician.
Let us picture to ourselves a weakling in medical college, who thinks he can cut down his work by confining his study to the treatment of a single part. Even if he goes to Germany and amuses himself for a year, watching the local treatment in the clinic of some celebrated specialist, he finds the same lotions used in the same manner and with the same results as in the medical clinic of his own home. Is it a wonder that so often in our hearing it is said the specialists are all humbugs?
The same lotion is used for every patient with a slight variation only in appearance. The great specialist and the small specialist are all the same in treatment and they all use the lotions that may be the latest fad. If they have found a more successful lotion it is only one that will do the patient a little more harm. In proportion as it relieves (?) the organ, in that proportion it injures the patient.
Homoeopathic patients should be instructed so that they will know, when going to a specialist, whether he is treating them constitutionally or locally. When the patient is consulting a specialist for spine, heart, or brain trouble, he should know whether it is one who will give crude drugs for physiological action, or who is a genuine homoeopathic prescriber and will take all the symptoms of mind, body, organs and parts and select that remedy which corresponds to the totality of the symptoms.
We have been too long silent on this subject.
The consequences of vicious suppressive treatment should be made known to all our patrons in no uncertain language. If the homoeopathician is outspoken in all the matters that are for the people’s good, it will be seen that we are not approaching the old school sufficiently to lead any person to predict a near conjunction of the two schools.
Why should a specialist who relies on local treatment expect to associate with homoeopathic physicians? Can local treatment in the hand, of a professed homoeopath be any different from local treatment in the hands of a traditional doctor?
When this treatment is the same as that used by the old school doctor why should he call himself a homoeopath
ADDRESS
An address delivered before the Boenninghausen Society, Philadelphia. Pa.
Prostration coming on slowly, Continued fever., Zymosis., Sordes in the mouth., Tympanitic abdomen., Diarrhoea., Delirium., Petechiae.
Agaricus, Arnica, Arsenicum, Arum-t., Baptisia, Bryonia, Carb-v., China, Cocc., Colchicum, Crot. horridus, Gelsemium, Helleborus, HYOS., kali-bi., kali-ph., Lachesis, Laur., Lycopodium, Mur-ac., Nit- ac., opium, petroleum, phos-ac., Phosphorus, Psorinum, Rhus-t., Secale, Stram, Sulphur Sulph-ac., Ver-al., Zincum met.
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.