The teaching of Hahnemann, in the Sixteenth Section of the Organon, is to the effect that the vital principle cannot be assailed by other than dynamic agencies, or spirit like agencies. This must be accepted as true. To prove that it is not true would require us to prove that scarlet fever, measles, smallpox, and in fact all acute infections and contagious diseases do assail the economy by other than spirit like means.
With all the instruments of the scientific school of medicine, with every effort and ambition, no progress has been made by them to establish their material hypothesis. Therefore Hahnemann’s statement must stand as true.
The more dynamic, the greater resemblance to the life force and vice versa. The septic virus is dynamic because it has been vitalized or dynamited in nature’s laboratory. It is a product of life operating upon matter, and the most dynamical toxics are animal ferments and ptomaines; no matter how concentrated they exist in a highly dynamic form.
The fluids and substances, ferments, ptomaines, etc., are the viruses, are the dynamic causes of fixed diseases; they are the causes of bacteria in all forms. It is not argued that the miscrosopical bacterium may not convey the fluid dynamic substances upon its body as perfectly to the detriment and hardship of men as a fly, a dog, or an elephant may. Fluids containing bacteria of well known disease producing character may be diluted until the bacteria is no longer found, and that fluid is just as active in its power to reproduce its own kind of sickness as when it was surcharged with microscopical animalcule. Of course there is a difference the susceptibility must be present in diluted virus, while any person may become ill from the concentrated ferment applied to any abrasion or injected hypodermically.
This condition once understood, the Materia Medica prover is prepared to consider the difference between the proving of drugs in full strength and in potentized form. But as there are no bacteria in drugs, and as they are as potent sick makers as ferments, when properly selected, it will be seen at once that it is not due to the bacteria in the concentrated virus, but to the virus itself. It is the life force of aconite, of silica, of virus of septic fluid, and not bacteria that makes man sick.
The susceptible prover catches the disease that flows into him when he proves Cuprum the same as the person who catches cholera when he becomes infected by the dynamis of cholera. He cannot protect himself or the vital force cannot resist the deranging influence of cholera any better than it can resist Cuprum- If he is susceptible. If he is not susceptible to cholera, he cannot take cholera; if he is not susceptible to Cuprum, he cannot prove Cuprum. But, by increasing the quantity or by changing the quality into quantity, of either, he may, without susceptibility, become sick, but it is not then in the same manner or course as that of natural contagion. Natural contagion and infection are only possible through the susceptibility of man to the noxious cause.
The doctrine seems to be essential to the perfect understanding of the image of man in drugs and diseases. When man has lost his equilibrium, so that he is not protected against deleterious influences, he is but an image of man, as man, in the order of his existence, cannot be assailed by any of the spirit substances that pervade the atmosphere in which he lives. Even if influenced by concentrated artificial sick-making causes, he does not suffer from the fully developed image of the disease, as when susceptible, unless lie is kept under the influence a long time, as is the case in alcoholic, opium, arsenic and hasheesh subjects. When momentarily affected he soon reacts and becomes himself.
Reflect upon the mental state of the man who has used alcoholic stimulants in great excess for many years. His manhood is gone, he is a constitutional liar, and will deceive in any manner in order to obtain whiskey. It may truly be said he is but an image of his former self, and much more an image of what he might have been. This is no exception. Indeed, every drug is capable of rising in its own peculiar way and making such changes in man as will identify itself in the image of man. There is no disease that has not its correspondence in the three kingdoms.
It is the physician’s duty to know that every proved drug contains the image of man, and the likeness of the disease and diseases it can cure. To be able to see a drug in its totality, to see its symptoms collectively as it assumes the human form not the body, but the character of the man, or his image must be the end in view in order to use the Materia Medica for the healing of the nations.
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.