Kent's Lectures and the Swedenborgian Influence on American Homoeopathy

James Tyler Kent (1849–1916) occupies a singular position in the history of American homoeopathy. His Lectures on Homoeopathic Philosophy (1900) became the definitive text for a generation of American practitioners, yet the deeply Swedenborgian metaphysics underpinning his clinical philosophy has rarely received systematic scholarly treatment.

Kent's conception of the vital force as a 'simple substance' bearing the impress of the divine order reflects Swedenborg's hierarchical cosmology almost exactly. For Swedenborg, the natural world was a continuous emanation from the spiritual, mediated by intermediate planes of being. For Kent, the vital force occupied precisely this mediating role between the immaterial mind and the material body.