As Homoeopathy includes both science and art, Homeopathy Repertory Study must consist of science and art.
The scientific method is the mechanical method; taking all the symptoms and writing out all the associated remedies with gradings, making a summary with grades marked, at the end.
There is an artistic method that omits the mechanical, and is better, but all are not prepared to use it. The artistic method demands that judgment be passed on all the symptoms, after the case is most carefully taken. The symptoms must be judged as to their value as characteristics, in relation to the patient; they must be passed in review by the rational mind to determine those which are strange, rare, and peculiar.
Symptoms most peculiar to the patient must be taken first, then those less and less peculiar until the symptoms that are common and not peculiar are reached, in order, from first to last.
These must be valued in proportion as they relate to the patient rather than to his parts, and used instead of ultimates and symptoms pathognomonic.
Symptoms to be taken: First- are those relating to the loves and hates, or desires and aversions. Next- are those belonging to the rational mind, so-called intellectual mind. Thirdly- those belonging to the memory,
These, the mental symptoms, must first be worked out by the usual form until the remedies best suited to his mental condition are determined, omitting all symptoms that relate to a pathological cause and all that are common to disease and to people. When the sum of these has been settled, a group of five or ten remedies, or as many as appear, we are then prepared to compare them and the remedies found related to the remaining symptoms of the case.
The symptoms that are next most important are those related to the entire man and his entire body, or his blood and fluids: as sensitiveness to heat, to cold, to storm, to rest, to night, to 0day, to time. They include both symptoms and modalities.
As many of these as are found, also, in the first group, the mental summary, are to be retained.
There is no need of writing out the remedies not in the mental group or summary; these symptoms, relating to the whole patient, cannot be omitted with any hope of success.
We must next look over all the record to ascertain which of that group are most similar to the particulars of the regions of the body; of the organs of the body; of the parts; and of the extremities.
Preference must be accorded to discharges from ulcers, from uterus during menstruation, from ears, and from other parts, as those are very closely related to the vital operation of the economy.
Next must be used the modalities of the parts affected, and frequently these will be found to be the very opposite of the modalities of the patient himself. A patient who craves heat for himself, generally, and for his body, may require cold to his head, to his stomach, or to the inflamed parts, hence the same rubric will not fit him and his parts. Hence to generalize by modalities of isolated particulars leads to the incorrect remedy or confounds values placed upon certain remedies.
There are strange and rare symptoms, even in parts of the body, which the experienced physician learns are so guiding that they must be ranked in the higher and first classes.
These include some keynotes which may guide safely to a remedy or to the shaping of results, provided that mental and the physical generals do not stand contrary, as to their modalities, and therefore oppose the keynote-symptoms.
Any remedy correctly worked out, when looked up in the materia medica, should be perceived to agree with, and to fit, the patient; his symptoms; his parts; and his modalities. It is quite possible for a remedy not having the highest marking in the anamnesis to be the most similar in image, as seen in the materia medica.
The artistic prescriber sees much in the proving that cannot he retained in the homeopathic repertory, where everything must be sacrificed for the alphabetical system. The artistic prescriber must study materia medica long and earnestly to enable him to fix in his mind sick images, which, when needed, will infill the sick personalities of human beings. These are too numerous and too various to be named or classified. I have often known the intuitive prescriber to attempt to explain a so-called marvelous cure by saying: “I cannot quite say how I came to give that remedy but it resembled him.”
We have heard this, and felt it, and seen it, but who can attempt to explain it? It is something that belongs not to the neophyte, but comes gradually to the experienced artistic prescriber. It is only the growth of art in the artistic mind: what is noticed in all artists. It belongs to all healing artists, but if carried too far it becomes a fatal mistake, and must therefore be corrected by repertory work done in even the most mechanical manner.
The more each one restrains the tendency to carelessness in prescribing and in method, the wiser he becomes in artistic effects and materia medica work. The two features of prescribing must go hand in hand, and must be kept in a high degree of balance, or loose methods and habits will come upon any good worker.
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.