Now, I say that gonorrhoea and all of these latent conditions of the body are one and the same thing; that primarily they date back to one and the same source. Of course, the books will tell you that gonorrhoea is not a constitutional disease; but when gonorrhoea will produce warts, and gonorrhoeal rheumatism, and will last throughout life, and children be brought into the world with the same disease, how are you going to get around it? There was a young man in the St. Louis City Hospital who had been there many months, and who was so sore in the bottoms of his feet that he could not get around; he had to leave his business, he was a baker. Finally his old employer came to me and wanted to know if I could do anything for that young man. I did not know anything about the nature of his disease. I told him to bring the young man to me. He was brought, and I learned from his history that years before he had had gonorrhoea; that it had been suppressed with injections. I put him under such constitutional treatment as these theories that I have just mentioned guided me to, and I cured him. In our city I have cured twenty-five or thirty cases of this peculiar kind of sycosis that dated back to a latent gonorrhoea. Symptoms of a latent gonorrhoea are unknown to the books. You will find nothing of it. It is known only to such observers as have been able to make two out of two times one-by putting things together. By and by I shall have a complete chain of evidence to show that gonorrhoea is a constitutional disease and can be handed down from father to son, as can syphilis. It is one of the chronic miasms, and one about which very little is known. If this be true, it is as dangerous to suppress a gonorrhoeal discharge before its time, as it is to suppress a syphilitic chancre before its time. You will never know if you go on treating these constitutional miasms by suppressing the primary manifestations-you will never know the harm you are doing.
The most of these are calculated by the process of evolution to wear themselves out, to roll out, or to evolve themselves into symptoms that are so depleting to the disease that they leave of themselves, or leave the patient very nearly free from the disease. Such is the calculation of Nature in a gonorrhoeal discharge, and such has been the intention of Nature in the chancres that appear upon the genitalia. But poor ignorant man, believing he must do something, has made it his first business to cauterize these chancres-to dry up these discharges-and he does not know how much harm he is doing. But this is only a private opinion. I have observed this, that there are two kinds of gonorrhoea- one is a simple urethral discharge, which when stopped by injection., will not produce a constitutional taint, because that is not sycosis; and the other form is the sycotic gonorrhoea, which, if suppressed with injections, will appear in constitutional symptoms. Now, it is for you to live and think for yourselves. If you can make anything out of what I have told you, and it ever helps anybody, I shall be amply repaid. You will most naturally see that all these thoughts are in furtherance of Hahnemann’s teaching, based upon the facts observed by him and his faithful followers. Unless guided by the light of the dynamic doctrine of disease and cure, these things would scarcely be observed. For the study of this sycosis I might have taken up Thuja, but knowing how well the master has performed his work, I have taken a remedy that is scarcely second in importance to bring out as well the use of a remedy as a miasm in relation to it.
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.