Digest Number 376

[x1x17]

While reading the posts on Classical Homeopathy, I thought I would
post this article I have been attempting to study:

Classification Of Constitutions Useless In Prescribing
Why should we attempt to classify constitutions as an aid in
prescribing? Every individual is a constitution, and no two sick persons
can be classified as of the same class to the satisfaction of any
clear, observing, and thinking homeopathist. It is a fatal error to
classify constitutions, as no two are sufficiently similar, when
observed by a genuine homeopathtician to form even a common class.
Human beings are a thousand times more complex than the chess board is
in the hands of most skillful players.

Every change in combination in mental or physical signs and
symptoms brings a new view of the entire patient as observed
collectively. Normal mental methods come to all thinkers in such
diverse appearences as to justify the well known statement that no two
minds are alike. In similar manner, all abnormal minds appear to the
alert physician as sick individuals. Mental abnormalities may be
classified by their common manifestations by the alienist, but the
classification is never useful to the homeopathist when searching for a
remedy. The classification is made up from common symptoms of the mental
disease sympptoms for the pupose of medical diagnosis, but THE PECULIAR
SYMPTOMS IN EACH AND EVERY MORBID MENTAL CASE MUST GUIDE TO THE
PERSCRIPTION, and these prevent classification.(Caps. represent itallics
in original essay).
Nothing leads the physician to failure so certainly as
classification.The physician who prescribes on a diagnois is a failure,
except for his chance shots. Individualization is the aim of every
homeopathic physician. The symptoms that represent the MORBID
constitution or DISORDER OF THE INDIVIDUAL are the ones that the
skillful prescriber always seeks. Symptoms that are uncommon in one
constitution are common in another, because such uncommon syptoms are
common to some diseases and uncommon to others.

Classification is necessary to the proper study of diseases,
pathological conditions, and diagnosis, but every case of sickness in an
individual is so dissimilar to another case that each and every patient
must be examined and measured by the symptoms that represent his
disordered economy, or prescribing will be followed by very ordinary
results.
Written By: James T. Kent