You must allow the patient to go through and let him have his say. If you ask them, “what are your fears?” they do not tell. Habitually they do not try. You must put it this way. “There are many people who have got fear of this and that” and she at once says “Yes” or “No” or she will not say Yes or No. She say, “I have fear of that.” It is what you want what you want. When you have finished your questioning. you must go back and cross question and see again by asking differently if fear is the symptom, if really this symptom is there if the symptom is correct.
And sometimes unfortunately what you were so pleased to find at first you may look and find later that it is not at all a good symptom. You see that in your sudden questioning you have made a mistake in not understanding well or you have not put the question as it should be put and so on. There are many shades that you must pay attention to. Now the fears are very important. Then comes somebody, who had told you she had no thought of suicide at all who now answer “I would choose a river”. But if she is thinking of suicide or she had thoughts of suicide before which she did not tell you now she reveals it by answering this question.
It is just one of those cross-questions you must try to put an it is interesting. So you ask your question about suicide. But sometimes the patient is not interested in saying `I think of suicide.’ But then you can see it in the pupil, in the right pupil and not only flat representing of grief as I told you it will be more flat. It is a suicidal tendency and (if it shows) in the right pupil, it is always something non-bloody, for example (suicide) by poison drowning etc.
If in the left eye, suicide is attempted in the bloody way, for example by jumping from a height etc., always bloody always something ugly to see. You see these marks in the pupil very long in advance. The Aurum will never tell you (of their intention to commit suicide) but the Nux vomica will tell you, at that time. “Yes, I will shoot myself or I will do this do this and that”. But not Aurum. He will hide, may be till the last moment when it is too late. But if you in the eyes, you will know it.
Impatience irritability.- Patients who go out of order because they are sensitive, they feel things too quickly and this way we must know the kind of irritability they have. They know this habitually not by themselves but from the people around them. The wife or the husband will tell you what they are. Then one symptom is very important for the discrimination, you know. It is to us very interesting, it is what we call the eliminatory symptoms. We mean by this the rubrics which will eliminate absolutely some other remedies.
There are cold and hot remedies like Dr. Tyler puts it. It is good. It may be very good but still you must, be very sure that you are right. The patient will tell you he is chilly, the others will say he is not so chilly. Some of them may say that they do not suppose there is heat, and yet they are in a room where you very hot enough, but they say nothing. They may come even in warm clothes. You must be careful about what they tell you. So I do not find this rubric the best one or eliminating drugs.
It is a good one of course ( in a negative way) e.g. when the patient, especially one whom you think is a sepia patient tells she is not chilly. Of course, she cannot be Sepia because Sepia patients are very chilly. You can see that if an Apis patient tells you he can support the heat very well he will not need Apis. Just like when the patient tells you he never drinks water for pulsatilla you are very pleased. But please remember if she tells you after wards “Yes, I am thirsty only at 2 o’clock it is still Pulsatilla, in the first grade please. Never thirsty except at 2 o’clock! this is one of those things you must know because other you may make a mistake.
There is one eliminating symptoms which I find very good provided the symptom is very typical. “What is the effect of consolation? There are patients who seek consolation and there are other who hate it. They will later tell you that it all depends from whom the consolation comes. “If it is my sweetheart consoling me or my wife or my mother, I like it very much, not the people whom I do not like very much. “So with this answer it is amelioration by consolation because really they are ameliorated.
You must not take this amelioration by consolation as a symptom. But there are people who really say,, “When I am upset, I go into my room” Ignatia, Arsenic, Nux vomica and such remedies cover this aversion to. And in this way it is very good to use an eliminating symptom. There are few such eliminating symptoms. If somebody hates consolation, it is a good symptoms. If somebody likes sweets and he is a young are plenty of people with the same symptom, do not consider this as very important.
And amelioration by consolation is not a symptom to be taken in the repertory. And why he (Kent) has put it there was because everybody was saying so and he could not avoid it. There may be a state where you find that amelioration by consolation is something very curious e.g. a patient has sciatica, a patient has terrible headache and consolation ameliorates. This is very interesting. There Pulsatilla may come in because it is something you will not expect and because it is something not usual. You must interpret the materia medica as it is. what is rare, what is peculiar, what is strange this is the thing you must remember.
I remember a professor, well-known in Geneva who suffered from asthma. Nobody could cure him. He went to homoeopath, allopath, naturopath, etc. Ultimately he came to see me. It was very difficult to find the remedy. The symptoms were simply pathognomonic. I saw some signs in his eyes and in his writing and I was so struck that I told him “Sometimes there are symptoms very difficult to express but you know in homoeopathy we always consider the disposition of the patients something sacred, which I am not there to judge.
I am there merely to comprehend, to help the human heart as kent says and in this spirit we can help sometimes very much” So I tried to look aside not to look at him. He said, “Yes I will tell you something,” and so out he came with many things. “You know I have a terrible habit. Every Sunday I take the train to Luzerne. Why every Sunday? Because there are many people in the train with their children And I choose a compartment where there are many ladies with their children. And I choose a place where there are little girls and I come near the lady and take the girl over my knees and I rock her to and fro and this excites me splendidly.
I am very much pleased So, every Sunday I go Luzerne, ten times you know, going and coming and try to find people to excite me. Can you imagine this? And when I go to a hotel, I always choose a room not inside but outside where there are other houses opposite and I like to undress myself when their window is open, so that the people can see me. This also excites me. Can you imagine this? Or I ring the bell for my breakfast and the moment the lady brings the breakfast I just take my shirt out so that I am almost naked.” You know how funny it is. He is an exhibitionist and it is very hard to know this. And in the repertory there is a rubric for this.
Where is this rubric? It is not given under the word exhibitionist. That is the trouble. When somebody is like that, what is he? He is shameless, so it is under the rubric “Shameless, exposes the person.” Exactly there is Phosphorus there. Phosphorus was the remedy. This, I gave him and his asthma went beautifully away. In this case I did not think of his asthma. I think of the symptom more important than asthma. Asthma was a result of this thing, it was the outward expression. But this symptom he never told anybody, because he was a professor, you know. And when he told me I put it right with Phosphorus And the result was splendid.
When your patient is homosexual, where do you search in the repertory? It is a very interesting symptom (someone in the audience ” Increased sexuality”) NO, no. It is not increased sexuality, not at all. This is a mental symptom. You must learn your repertory by heart almost and know where to search. You know, I am looking into the repertory for the last forty seven years every day you know, fifty times at least. Of course, you will never forget it when you find it once if you have the gray substance beside the white one (in the brain) Look what is written under `Love, love with one of her own sex’ It is interesting.
Of course I have added and corrected my repertory, because I am now reading much Knerr’s Repertory which is a very fine book. So I find Pulsatilla in my repertory. So about the sexual symptoms, your situation is like that because it depends whether it is a lady or a gent. It is more easy to ask questions to a lady than a man. It is very funny but for a lady doctor it is more easy to ask questions of a man than of a lady. It is a question of confidence. We don’t like to tell our weaknesses to someone of the same sex.
Dr. Schmidt was introduced to the results of homeopathic treatment during the 1918 flu epidemic while living in London. There he met both J. H. Clarke and John Weir.
In 1922 he came to the United States and began his studies with Alonzo Austin and Frederica Gladwin, who had been a pupil of Kent's. He became the first graduate of the American Foundation for Homeopathy course for doctors. Returning to his native land he set up practice in Geneva, Switzerland. He was responsible for reintroducing classical homeopathy into Europe, teaching several generations of physicians, including Elizabeth Wright Hubbard.
Dr. Schmidt helped edit the "Final General Repertory" of Kent, and translated the Organon into French. In 1925, he was one of the main founders of the Liga Medicorum Homoeopathic Internationalis (LIGA).