If you can get such marked eliminating symptoms to begin with, see what lively small number if drugs you have to carry down through all, the rubrics, and how much easier ad quicker it is to get your remedy, and got much greater confidence you have in the result of your search.
You will generally find, as you work down, that one drug stands out more and more permanently it may not be in all the rubrics, but it has got to be in all the important ones, i.e., those best marked in the patient, and of highest grade. And presently you throw down your pen: you are convinced: and it is a mere waste of time to go further.
Now take the same case and start, instead, on the marked symptoms complained of by the patient-the Particulars, and just see what work you have cut out for you! Begin with the rubric Vomiting, and write it out for the last time, and see what it entails. And write all the drugs, in all the types, test you should miss any. Take his particular symptoms, one by one, and write, and write, and write.
Vomiting, 162 drugs.
Vomiting water, 108 drugs.
Vomiting sour, 89 drugs.
Burning pain in the stomach, 186 drugs.
Pain in the stomach p.c. 110 drugs, etc.
It may be easily such a list, of which this is but the merest beginning:-no wonder that people get “Repertory funk!” for remember that people are actually doing, at this moment, in all quarters of the world: for they are sending us their beautifully near, conscientious and exhaustive work to show, as they ask for a better way: and it is their cry for help that has caused this article to be compiled. Sheets and sheets of paper you will cover. One that lies before us now has all the drugs in forty-nine different rubrics, some of immense length, as Stools offensive, Burning urine, Stools past, Yellow stools.
Why, before you are ever come down to such symptoms, you should have three or four drugs only in hand:-and they are symptoms of the lowest grade, and Common symptoms; hardly worth glancing through for confirmation of the drug. Moreover, there is the possibility that you may accidentally omit the very drug you want from some of the long lists you are so slavishly copying: and the odds are, that when they are all complete, without the aid of eliminating symptoms some half-a-dozen drugs will come out pretty near one another when you count up at the end, and that you traveaux d’ Hercule will leave you unconvinced and still in doubt.
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.