THREE VIEWS OF KENT – Peter Morrell

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“When you see failures you may be sure that they are within
yourself. If you think the failure is in homoeopathy, you will begin your corrections on
the wrong side of the ledger. [p.655]

“Eternal Principles, themselves, are authority. The Law of
Similars is a Divine Law. So Soon as you have accepted the Law of Similars, so soon have
you accepted Providence, which is law and order. [p.646]

“The outer world Is the world of results. The inner world (of
causes) is not discoverable by the senses but by the understanding. [p. 657]

“There are two worlds, the world of thought, of immaterial
substance, and the world of matter or material substance.[p.648, also in Lectures, p.69,
p.75, and p.85-6]

“There is an innermost to everything that exists, or the
outermost could not be. [p.645]

‘One cannot afford to be liberal with principle.’ [p.655]

These quotes indicate a rather fixed position relating to theory and thus
a rather puritanical or dogmatic attitude. The whole tone throughout Kent’s Lectures is
insistently dogmatic, inflexible, certain and dictatorial. These qualities doubtless derive
in part from Hahnemann himself, but they have been rekindled, restated and reasserted
repeatedly by leaders of the movement down the years — especially by Kent.

“The Homeopathic principles, when known, are plain, simple and
easily comprehended. They are in harmony with all things known to be true.[Aphorisms &
Precepts, p.654]

“… beware of the opinion of men of science. Hahnemann has
given us principles which we can study and advance upon. It is law which governs the world
and not matters of opinion or hypothesis.” [Lectures, p.18

“This means law, it means fixed principles; it means a law as
certain as that of gravitation; not guesswork, empiricism, or roundabout methods, or a cut
and dried use of drugs… our principles have never changed, they have always been the
same and will remain the same…” [Lectures, p.28]

I think we can see pretty clearly that Kent adopted a rather dogmatic
stance. He skates over complex issues with what many today would regard as a rather
simplistic attitude. Like the relationship between principles and opinion. One man’s
principle IS another’s opinion, surely?

At some point in relation to allopathic medicine, Kent says:

“Man today is destroyed as to his interiors so that truth looks
as black as smoke and false philosophy as bright as the sun.” [‘Aphorisms…’, p.657]

That clearly indicates the thinking and the language which still
predominates to a large extent even today. It forms a very clear example of what amounts to
their utter ‘demonisation’ of allopathy and science and by contrast the deification of
homeopathy. It would seem that science, allopathy, change, experiment, innovation and
free-thinking are all components of the terrifying nightmares of the homeopathic puritan,
all of which must be banished, exorcised and resisted at all costs in their ceaseless
‘jihad’ against anything which they see as a threat to the sacrosanct core dogmas of
Hahnemann’s system.

The Anti-Materialist

Kent said that doctors have no business whatever to be ‘down in the sewers
looking for the causes of disease, but should correct the vital force’. This interesting
remark reveals very clearly the vast gulf that had opened up between homeopathy and
allopathy by around 1900. Yet as Time has shown, doctors have every business to be ‘down in
the sewers’. It shows how incredibly out of touch with the rest of medicine most homeopaths
had become by 1900, and how they got themselves into that position very largely through a
rigid and pedantic overprotectiveness about their own ‘pure dogmas’. In one sense, of
course, Kent is right to say that doctors should correct the vital force rather than poke
around in the sewers. He is right because in an ideal world with universal use of homeopathy
our vital forces would be in such good shape that bacteria would not cause us any harm. OK
fine. But we do not live in such an ideal world, and in any case at the time he was talking
many people were still dying of bacterial infections like Cholera, Diphtheria and Typhus,
directly caused through poor sanitation. It can be argued that hygiene and sanitation did
not really stem from allopathy, but from direct observation and engineering technique.

For example, in one London Cholera epidemic in the 1840’s the doctor who
chained the pump in Golden Square to prevent the further spread of the disease was in fact a
homeopath! He had conceived the idea that the water from the pump was in some way the cause
of the disease. In this sense the idea of miasms predates the germ theory of disease, as it
implies an ‘invisible cause’ which generates an illness within the organism.

In this sense therefore he was talking dangerous nonsense and being
irresponsible as a doctor of medicine. Because, although it is true that there is more to
bacteria causing disease than meets the allopathic eye, it is also true that improving
public hygiene would have been a much bigger medical advance than any expansion in the use
of homeopathic treatment. So he got it partly right and partly very wrong. In any case,
infectious agents mainly affect the weakest members of society –the very old and frail and
the very young, and allopaths tend to downplay such selective effects of infections in any
population of people. They give a ‘black version’ that is just as partial and thus just as
incompletely true as the ‘white version’ of Kent. That translates into the ‘universal’ basis
for vaccination — everyone must have one — a metaphysic which seems to ignore the high
variability of individual susceptibility to infection.

The following quotes from Kent’s ‘New Remedies, Clinical Cases, Aphorisms
and Precepts’ convey very clearly Kent’s views about bacteria:

“The tendency for the human mind to run after the visible, that
can be felt with the fingers, leads one to adopt foolish theories like the Bacteria
doctrine and the molecular theory. [p.649]

“Most doctors have gone crazy over the vicious Microbe as being
the cause of disease, and think the little fellows are exceedingly dangerous. As a matter
of fact they are scavengers. Shortly after death a prick with a scalpel is a serious
matter, but when the cadaver has become green and is filled with bacteria, It is
comparatively harmless. [p.663]

“The microbe is not the cause of disease. We should not be
carried away by these idle allopathic dreams and vain imaginations, but should correct the
Vital Force.[p.663]

“It is not from external things that man becomes sick, not from
bacteria nor environment, but from causes within himself.

“Save the life of the patient first and don’t worry about the
bacteria. They are senseless things.[p.663]

“There is an insanity in the sciences of the present
day…because they want something that in its aggregate will be large enough to be felt
with the fingers.” [p.643]

“The Bacterium is an innocent feller, and if he carries disease
he carries the Simple Substance which causes disease, just as an elephant would.”
[p.663]

The Religious Moralist

We don’t have to search very hard to find a mass of religious ideas within
homeopathy which illustrate how puritanical and moralising homeopaths tend to be. The
following quotes from Kent’s Lectures and Aphorisms reveal a very rich seam of such
material:

“You cannot divorce medicine and theology. Man exists all the
way down from his innermost spiritual to his outermost natural” [p.641]

“A man who cannot believe in God cannot become a
homeopath.” [p.671]

‘The body became corrupt because man’s interior will became corrupt.’
[ibid, p.681]

‘Man… becomes disposed to sickness by doing evil, through thinking
wrong…’ [ibid, p.664]

‘Psora is the evolution of the state of man’s will, the ultimates of
sin.’ [ibid, p.654]

‘This outgrowth, which has come upon man from living a life of evil
willing, is Psora.’ [ibid, p.654]

‘Thinking, willing and doing are the 3 things in life from which
finally proceed the chronic miasms.’ [ibid, p.654]

‘… had Psora never been established as a miasm upon the human
race…susceptibility to acute diseases would have been impossible…it is the foundation
of all sickness.’ [Lectures, p.126]

‘Psora… is a state of susceptibility to disease from willing
evils.’ [ibid, p.135]

‘The human race today walking the face of the earth, is but little
better than a moral leper. Such is the state of the human mind at the present day. To put
it another way everyone is Psoric.’ [ibid, p.135]

‘Psora…would not exist in a perfectly healthy race.’ [ibid, p.133]

‘As long as man continued to think that which was true and held that
which was good to the neighbour, that which was uprightness and justice, so long man
remained free from disease, because that was the state in which he was created.’ [ibid,
p.134]

‘The internal state of man is prior to that which surrounds him;
therefore, the environment is not the cause…’ [ibid, p.136]

‘Diseases correspond to man’s affections, and the diseases upon the
human race today are but the outward expression of man’s interiors…man hates his
neighbour, he is willing to violate every commandment; such is the state os man today.
This state is represented in man’s diseases.’ [ibid, p.136]

‘The Itch is looked upon as a disgraceful affair; so is everything
that has a similar correspondence; because the Itch in itself has a correspondence with
adultery…’ [ibid, p.137]

‘How long can this thing go on before the human race is swept from
the earth with the results of the suppression of Psora?’ [ibid, pp.137-8]

‘Psora is the beginning of all physical sickness…is the underlying
cause and is the primitive or primary disorder of the human race.’ [ibid, p.126]

‘…for it goes to the very primitive wrong of the human race, the
very first sickness of the human race that is the spiritual sickness…which in turn laid
the foundation for other diseases. [ibid, p.126]

I think it is abundantly clear from these quotes that Kent took a very
puritanical and moral line about the origins of disease within the human race and he
apparently felt that Psora was equivalent to Original Sin or the Fall of Man. That is the
clear implication of the above remarks he made. He got himself into this strange position
very largely from insisting that homeopathy necessarily involves a religious dimension which
places a moral duty upon the practitioner, and thus the homeopath has a morally redeeming
influence through cure. Thus he viewed the homeopath as a Godly saviour who dispenses
spiritual as well as physical cures; and that illness is/stems from a corrupted state of
man, which homeopathy can cure. Kent’s logic is rather like…’all sick men are bad;
Socrates is sick, therefore Socrates is bad’. But in his case he contends ‘all sickness
originates from internal causes; internal causes are spiritual; therefore all sickness has a
spiritual basis’.

And then from there he equates internal and spiritual causes as the
miasms. Thus in his view the miasms are to be viewed as internal spiritual sins, or
derivatives of them.

He also avers another line of argument: ‘all disease causes (inner world)
are invisible and nebulous; all potentised remedies are of a similar nature; thus potentised
substance, and especially the higher potencies, are the only means of curing disease (by
reaching into the subtle interior realm of disease causes)’ This also leads to his
oft-repeated adage of ‘the higher the deeper’. This probably also forms the basis for his
strong advocacy and use of the very highest potencies. In this manner we can analyse and
dissect Kent’s brand of homeopathy.

Like the Mediaeval Churchmen, Kent shows a remarkable devotion to
deductive logic and an apparent ignorance of induction or of knowledge based upon
experiment, data and the evidence of the senses — to which he also remains either oblivious
or contemptuous. There are some good parallels between Kent and Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) in
that both treat their subject matter with immense reverence as received dogma which cannot
even be questioned, and then build upon that base their towers of speculation and
philosophy. Both also tend in the direction of rigid dogmatism, excessive preciousness and
zealous devotion to ‘truth’ as received knowledge — not as freedom of thought or
experimentation, towards which both seem utterly opposed.

I would contend that the puritan idea within homeopathy (and in medicine
generally) is correctly invoked by Kent, in that illness tends to be regarded by many of us
as an unwanted evil which must be ‘cleansed’ out of the system by the healer. In most
cultures the healer is thus viewed as an agent of divine assistance.

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