It is one thing to assemble all the diverse symptoms of disease, but quite another to be able to pick out those peculiar ones which also interpenetrate the others. Hahnemann said that a paucity of symptoms or the presence of an overshadowing one point toward suppression. Here the life force seems able to show only a faint sign, as it were, of its distress. We see such things in shock, fulminating diseases, cholera, the passage of calculi, etc.

The test of your homoeopathy comes upon you when you contact such conditions. then, unless you know your Arnica, Camphor, Cuprum, Veratrum album or Polygonum sagittatum it will be just too bad. Such outstanding single symptom groups occasionally have a concomitant of decisive import, such as happened in a case of hip joint disease, with shortening, in a highly tubercular family. The patient was pale, proud and exacting; Arsenicum cured and there remains no contraction.

Studies in the Philosophy of Healing C. M. Boger