A STUDY OF KENT’S REPERTORY ” By DR. MARGARET TYLER
With acknowledgments to DR.R.GIBSON MILLER, DR.WEIR (from whose lectures this is mainly reproduced), and DR.BORLAND.
WHEN one thinks of the bewilderment and despair of the uninitiated, engaged in a first tussle with Kent’s stupendous Repertory, one is haunted by the old-rime story in his chariot, reading as he journeyed, to whom a stranger joined himself with the pertinent question, “Understandest thou what thou readest?” and the prompt reply,”How can I, except some man should guide me?”
“How can I, except some man should guide me?” There are mazes yet that badly need the “silken clue”.Kent’s Repertory is such a maze. Once the thread in hand, you can penetrate with ease its deepest recesses. But without the clue, you are hopelessly lost.
It is a question whether men trained from the start. in Homoeopathy can at all appreciate the difficulties of those who were never trained, but who have had to pick out everything for themselves. They hardly realise the almost insuperable difficulties presented by such a work to those who lack the very simple clue, in the scheme on which, from end to end, the Repertory is complied. Once master the scheme, and it is simplicity itself. You can turn up, in a moment, what you want.
But, what do you want?. You have got to learn that too! For without the knowledge of what you do want, without the all important grading of symptoms (i, e, the realisation of their comparative value) life is too short, even when you have mastered its construction, to use the Repertory as your habitual guide in prescribing. And unless you to do use it, and commonly work out your cases, you will be unable to use is, or to trust it in emergencies, when you would give your very soul for a drug that could save.
For my part, I can sympathise and understand; because I so well remember my own difficulties. Until I first heard Dr.Weir’s lecture on the subject, three years ago, in spite of having worked with quite a number of repertories for years, comparing them in the effort to deduce from them something simple and quickly workable, I must say that I groped hopelessly in Kent; especially in the pain sections; and had not the haziest notion how to find just what I wanted. Rubric after rubric, at the interval of a few pages, seemed to have almost the same heading, and yet a different list of remedies. The same ground seemed to be covered again and again, with a different result. How has I to choose my exact rubric, and be sure of my drug?
Therefore, remembering my own experiences, as one of the great uninitiated, and the illumination that came to me in what I then thought one of the most important if an important series of lectures, when the call came recently, in two urgent requests, one in this country and one in America, to put this paper into shape, I felt that I must answer it; must try to reproduce, in part anyway, the subject-matter of that lecture; so that others too may grasp the idea, and he made “free” of the Repertory.
To be asked to pronounce and teach under the very eye of critics and experts is not a little alarming.(* Yet I have a feeling that I may be able to deal with the question more helpfully than even the highest authority of all, or the men he has trained who, in their turn, taught me all that I know*), simply because I am unique among them in having experienced the difficulties of the uninitiated. They have not! Therefore to the uninitiated I offer this attempt at help; trusting that in the discussion that follows, the critics and experts may be able to point out any errors or fallacies; and that Dr. Kent himself will be moved to endorse or refute what is here put forth. the subject is URGENT, if Homoeopathy is to reign. Nothing will count, in these days, but the best work.
But before considering where to look for what we want, let us pause for a moment to consider what we want to find. For to quite know what we want to find will simplify our work, and greatly limit our labours.
What we want to find, is, of course, the homoeopathic remedy. That is what we go to the Repertory to discover.
But what is the homoeopathic remedy? Why, the homoeopathic remedy is always that drug which, in its pathogenesis, exhibits the morbid symptoms of the actual patient we desire to cure.
The actual patient, to begin with! It is the symptoms of the patient; not necessarily the symptoms of the disease for which the patient consults us.
Hahnemann says that the physician must realise that he is concerned not with diseases, but with sick persons. In a patient we must see a person who is suffering; an individual who deviates from the normal of the race, and from his own-normal; a mortal out of tune, to some extent, with environment, physical or mental, and therefore distressed.
If you are treating merely a case of some named disease, and attempt to hunt that disease through Repertory and Materia Medica, you are very unlikely to discover the curative remedy. To begin with, drugs have seldom been pushed far enough to produce pathological lesion; and if your work is based on pathological changes, you are done. Again, supposing many drugs had been pushed so far as to produce Pneumonia, for instance, each would produce not only a pneumonia with symptoms peculiar to itself, but would also elicit symptoms peculiar to individual provers, so that you would still need to individualise, in order to cure. Pathologists know that drugs produce pneumonia or sciatica; what they do not know is that they produce a modified sciatica or pneumonia.
What you have to discover is, the remedy needed by the patient himself; the remedy that corresponds to him, body and soul-and more especially soul! You need his individual remedy; the remedy for which his symptoms (symptoms inherent in himself, not dependent on his pathological lesions,- his “obvious morbid anatomy,”) cry.
So you may find that there are a great many symptoms, very pressing to the patient, that you may discard at once, since they will not help you one scrap in your search for the remedy. A patient with ankylosis is necessarily stiff. The stiffness appeals to him; and on account of that stiffness he appeals to you; since it limits his movements, and cripples his activities. But stiffness will not help you in your search for a remedy for that patient! It is a common, an inevitable symptom in ankylosis, accounted for by the pathological changes.
Dyspnoea, with an enlarged thyroid, in part impacted behind the clavicles, would be intensely distressing to the patient; but it would not be an important symptom, unless qualified, so far as repertory work was concerned. It would be a “common” symptom. with such a lesion, dependent on a mechanical cause. The drug, unless it had been pushed to produce just such a lesion, would not need to have Dyspnoea in black type! Dyspnoea, on the contrary, with nothing grossly mechanical to account for it, might lead to the consideration of certain remedies, especially if qualified by some modality, as “worse in wet weather-on waking-during sleep.” Or again, frequency of micturition, with a morbid growth impacted in the pelvis, would not help you in the choice of a remedy. It would be a symptom secondary to gross pathological change; not a symptom expressing the patient herself, but a symptom merely dependent on mechanical pressure; promptly relieved by the removal of the tumour.
Symptoms, then, dependent on mechanical cause, do not express the patient, and are useless for homoeopathic prescribing. They may, it is true, lead to the exhibition of a more or less palliative remedy-palliative to the pressing distress; they are useless for the selection of the curative drug.
So, before you ever open your repertory, or plunge into the vertex of drugs, you can discard all the symptoms dependent on gross lesions, and so cut down a little your work.
Which means,. always examine your patient with care before you start with the repertory.
Be sure that the symptoms you take are peculiar to, and characteristic of the patient himself, and not merely secondary to disease. But remember! you cannot eliminate symptoms dependent on a disease which you have n0t diagnosed!
Besides pathological symptoms, there are COMMON SYMPTOMS; and these again will not help you greatly; qualified. But they will cause you an immense amount of work, if you elect to start on them.
Common symptoms are of two kinds, symptoms common to the disease, which are merely diagnostic, and do not show how the patient reacts to this particular “morbific agent,” as Hahnemann puts it; and therefore useless for the selection of one remedy- such as diarrhoea, vomiting, excessive sweating, headache. Common symptoms do not serve to distinguish, and you need to distinguish, if you are to pick out THE drug. Take the question of thirst; your patient has fever, and is extremely thirsty. This is a common symptom; doubly common as a matter of fact, for thirst is common to every many remedies, and to most fevers. You must have something more, something that distinguishes and qualifies to make the symptom of the slightest use to you:- and yet the symptom of the slightest use and, as concerns the patient, urgent. Enquire further, and see if you cannot make it useful. Supposing you find that the thirst is at one particular hour; or only during the cold stage, or before it; or that it is for large quantities, or small; or that there is thirstlessness during the period of high temperature only; or a ranging thirst with no desire to drink; why, these things are peculiar to individual patients and to fewer drugs, and are therefore of importance. Underline them. They are distinctive. You will be able to use them to help to find the remedy. You see how a common and useless symptom may be transformed into one of Kent’s “strange, rare and peculiar, therefore general symptoms-because strange, rare and peculiar must apply to the patient himself.
