This is a new word, but expresses what we all desire in repertorising, and what we have got to be very chary of using too rigidly, lest we lose the remedy we are looking for.
Instances best reveal meanings. Take one. Say your patient complains of dyspepsia, with burning pain in the stomach, and the frequent vomiting of sour fluid. He pours you out particulars, which he has at his finger-tips; since they are just there symptoms that impress a man’s memory, but intruding themselves on his consciousness in a very realistic way.
You jot them down till you have got the case as fully as most people go, with all its modalities (i.e. the conditions as to hat and cold, movement and rest, position, hours of day and night, relation to food and drink, etc., of the stomach condition complained of). You have assured yourself, b careful examination as to whether the trouble is likely to be organic or functional; or whether some of symptoms have got to be discounted, as secondary to some gross lesion. And now it is your turn.
You have to elicit the general symptoms of your patient; you have got to switch him off the siding “my,” and on to the main line “I and you now find that he cannot stand heat-whatever his stomach may do; that he is ill if long out in the sun: that he wants a cold tool, prefers cold weather and a cold climate: that he never goes near the fire: and you noticed when he came in them, though the weather was cold, he was not buttoned up, or thickly clothed. It is not closeness or stuffiness so much that affects him (you have got to be careful between these!) but heat. He is one of Dr. G. Miller’s “Predominantly hot-remedy people.”
There is an eliminating symptom for you! You know at once, whatever his stomach condition may be (its particular symptoms might perhaps be ally well-met by Arsenicum, Phosphorus, Nux vomica, Lycopodium, Nat-mur, or a host of others); but with that temperament, that warm personality, it would be useless for deep and curative work to think of giving him Arsenicum, Phosphorus, Nux or Sepia He is a hot patient, and these are predominantly cold remedies. You can strike them out at once. For even if one of them, aptly fitting the exact stomach symptoms only, gave temporary relief to the immediate condition, the patient would relapse again and again.
It could not hold, It would act as a palliative, not a curative drug. It might provide a temporary organ-stimulus: it could never be the stimulus of the organism. and here you see well the difference between deep and superficial work between curative and palliative. the people who get their honest triumphs in similars, and see at least brilliant temporary results in superficial and acute conditions, and belief honestly that these are the very best attainable by medicine, scout the idea of the lasting triumphs of the simillimum.
They know well, from years of experience, their own limitations and it seems to them outrageous that other people should make large claims. As a matter of fact, when you get t the real simillimum, the odds a that instead of palliating the stomach condition you will aggravate it a thousand fold-for the moment; aggravates it, once and for all, to cure.
And if you do not know your work, you will think that you have got the wrong medicine and antidote or change it: and your patient will be, so far as you are concerned, incurable. But it may be be your ignorance only that makes him so!
So now, down all the rubrics, mental, general, and particular, you will carry that great eliminating symptom WORSE FROM HEAT, and ruthlessly cut out all the remedies that are chilly, and therefore deeply help chilly people. None of these you need write down at all. Using Dr. G. Miller’s list, which we will give in a moment, you can go on top any other General, and especially to any marked mental symptom, and often get a pretty correct idea of the exact remedy before you ever start to tackle you particular and immediate suffering for which the patient comes to you.
Now supposing you discover that he is liable to fits of depression, and yet cannot endure any attempt at consultation; that he becomes a very fiend if anyone attempts to cheat him up-even top inquire what is amiss: the people have learnt to let him severely alone, when his needs are upon him; why, with these two important symptoms alone, worse from heat and worse from consolation, which have got be in equal type, remember, in the patient and in the drug, you have reduced your area of search of Lil-tag., Nat mur, and Platina (for Lycopodiuma nd Mercurius come through the “(<)consolation test” i the lowest type only., which is hardly good enough for such a marked loathing o consolation as this!) Or, if your patient had been as predominantly chilly and worse for cold as this one was for heat, and the aggravation from consolation rest came out as strongly, you would have found yourself at the start of your work with Ar.., Belladonna, Calc-ph., Ignatia,, nitricum acidum, Sepia and Silicea, with two or three others to play with in brackets-lowest type.
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.