Use Of Lesser Known Or Used Repertories
NATIONAL JOURNAL OF HOMOEOPATHY 1997 Nov / Dec VOL 5 NO 6.
Dr T K Kasiviswanathan
'Puls / Sep / Verbascum / Art-vul
In the history of Homoeopathy, many stalwarts have left behind their imprint by way of case records, erudite articles on remedies and above all, aids in the form of repertories to help themselves and fellow practitioners. While many repertories covered all organs from mind, head to foot, others were devoted to particular organs or diseases such as Bell's Diarrhoea, Yingling's Accoucher' Emergency Manual Berridg's Diseases of the Eyes, etc. Each such repertory has its own special features (and also limitation) which general repertories cannot provide. Further, in general repertories, the arrangement is on an entirely different basis, which is why a certain repertory is more useful for a particular category of cases depending upon the nature of symptoms. Many practitioners are not aware of the existence of such repertories or their usefulness in their practice. However, getting conversant with such repertories will pay rich dividends to a busy practitioner when he finds that the remedy selected by him fails to hold or cure. An attempt has been made in this article to draw attention to some of them.
Therapeutic Pocket Book
This repertory, compiled by Dr Boeninghausen is based on his vast clinical experience and comprehensive knowledge of the principle of Homoeopathy, and tries to rectify the defects he observed in earlier repertories. In his Introduction he says, "Under the old arrangement of repertories, either, the more or less important symptoms are scattered among different rubrics making the comprehension of the totality difficult, or, there are numerous gaps for which there is no basis, such as an analogy may have furnished." He tried to rectify these defects by bringing out the peculiarities and characteristics of the remedies according to their various relations, and opened a way into the wide fields of combination, which had not been trodden on before.
The scope of his repertory was two-fold. One, to aid the physician in the selection of the remedy and secondly, to act as a guide in the study of the Materia Medica for judging the greater or lesser value of each symptom and to make the whole more complete and sharply defined. Dr Boeninghausen constructed his repertory, based on Hahnemann's grouping of symptoms-that it is imperative that the prescription be based on the totality of the case.
For the totality, three factors must be present
1. Locality- the part, organs or tissues involved in the disease process,
2. Sensation-the kind of pain, sensation, functional or organic change characteristic of the morbidity
3. Conditions of aggravation and amelioration of the symptoms ie the circumstances causing, exciting, increasing or otherwise affording modification or relief of the suffering.
He added a fourth, equally imperative, requirement made up of three divisions. The first is the concomitant symptom ie a symptom that exists or occurs with others, and his repertory is therefore based on the doctrine of concomitance. Often, the concomitant symptom may seemingly have no relation to the leading symptoms of the case from the standpoint of pathology. They are symptoms for which there is apparently no reason for existence but they have an actual relationship in that they exist at the same time in the patient. The concomitant symptom is the differentiating factor- what aggravation or amelioration is to the single symptom. This is signal contribution to the method of analysis of cases and Repertorisation.
Dr Boeninghausen writes, "Convinced of the importance of symptoms which occur simultaneously, and therewith form symptom groups, I have been adding for many years to the concomitant symptoms which are found in Materia Medica Pura, whatever belonging to them, from the experience of myself and others and their number increased so incredibly that I have been able to deduce general rules. Some remedies, more than others, incline to concomitant symptoms and that these do not consist exclusively of particular symptoms but in general of every sort of complaint, which lies within the sphere of the remedy, though indeed the characteristics may be found more frequently among them than elsewhere. This discovery, tested by long experience, led me to place the "Concomitant symptoms" together under each section". In this repertory we find the following :
1. Pg 24 - Drugs which have concomitant mental symptoms.
2. Pg 51 - Accompanying symptoms of nasal discharges
3. Pg 119 - Accompanying troubles of leucorrhoea
4. Pg 122 - Accompanying troubles of Respiration
5. Pg 96 - Troubles: Before, during and after stools
6. Pg 107 - Troubles: Before, during and after micturition and at close
7. Pgs 116-7 - Before, at the beginning, during and after menstruation
A unique feature of this repertory is the large section "Relationship of remedies" where Dr Boeninghausen has classified the relationship of remedies to symptom groups under mind, localities, sensations, glands, bones, skin, sleep and dreams, blood circulation and fever and aggravations of time and circumstance, etc and given comparative value of the remedies under each group. This is because each remedy partakes to some extent the attributes of every other remedy. "It would hardly be possible to select two remedies so different from each other that they would not touch at some point" (Dr Roberts). Though this section was, at the time of compilation, far from complete, it helps in finding the appropriate remedy where the earlier chosen remedy fails to hold in both acute and chronic cases. A case illustration follows.
