Doctor Kent: The American Genius Of Homoeopathy.
James Tyler Kent (1849-1916) did not invent homoeopathy, but he advanced its science and its philosophy to such an extent that today’s homoeopaths all use his books written more than a century ago as their basic mandatory tools of the trade. This is indeed an amazing achievement on Dr. Kent’s part: as we chanced to mention in another entry, only philosophy is timeless and sempervirens, whereas science becomes outdated often even during the lifetime of its erstwhile revolutionary originator.
Not so in Dr. Kent’s case. Yes, indeed, he was a bona fide philosopher of medicine, and in this sense, timeless. But his science too is alive and well today, with all those homoeopaths who came after him in the last hundred years offering merely incremental specific additions to it, of certain new, previously undiscovered remedies, yet none ever challenging the large basic stock of his essential repertory, nor bringing anything new and edifying to the Hippocrates-Hahnemann-Kent philosophy of homoeopathic science.
Kent’s three principal books: Repertory of the Homoeopathic Materia Medica; Lectures on Homoeopathic Materia Medica; and Lectures on Homoeopathic Philosophy together constitute perhaps the most important body of work in the history of homoeopathy, and undoubtedly one of the greatest contributions to medical science and philosophy of all time. Like Hahnemann, Kent possessed an incredibly high sense of intuition, thus infusing a sublime irrational element into a conspicuously rational matter, which distinguishes a genius from a mere scholar. But apart from the intuition, which would allow him to make quite a few earthshaking discoveries, Kent was also a poet, an artist in his field, and his imaginative, inspired descriptions of what is supposed to be an arcane, atrociously convoluted, and equally boring subject matter, have opened this otherwise closed professional field to the interested layman, just like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche opened the tightly sealed crypt of professional philosophy to the enchanted gaze of the truth- and wisdom-seeking philosophizing amateurs.
In previous discussions of the basic difference between a genius and a scholar, we quoted Nietzsche and his secret admirer Leo Strauss, in emphasizing that the former is the pioneer and a creator, whereas the latter is merely a brilliant organizer of other people’s ideas. This distinction does not quite work in Dr. Kent’s case. He was a creator, an artist, and an incomparable scholar-organizer all wrapped in one. The aesthetic value of his literary accomplishment virtually soars up there with his scientific achievement, and complements it. No one, before or after him, could so meaningfully and comprehensively depict basic patient types and the accompanying galleries of medical symptoms, which in themselves do not constitute a disease, but lead the healer toward identifying it and prescribing the proper remedy from a medical chest of hundreds of names, embodied in pills, tinctures, and dilutions.
To Kent also belongs one of the most unusual discoveries in homoeopathy going along the same road that Hahnemann had tread before him, but much farther, to the effect that the higher and extra-high dilutions of homoeopathic remedies, where the healing substance itself is virtually non-existent as a physical presence, amount to the drug’s highest potencies, thus achieving the greatest effect in sick patients, whereas a crude drug, where its physical presence remains substantial after a shorter series of dilutions, may do more harm than good, bringing the patient under the influence of the drug, and subject to its negative side effects, and therefore such practice ought to be avoided in most cases.
To sum it up, although the great pioneering genius of Dr. Hahnemann reigns supreme in the stratosphere of homoeopathy, his unquestionable viceroy, prime minister, and the caretaker of the realm is the philosopher, practitioner, entertaining and funny impresario, and incredibly talented writer Doctor James Tyler Kent.
(See my other entries directly or indirectly referring to Dr. Kent.)
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