Synthesis-Repertorium Homeopathicum Syntheticum The Source Repertory

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

Last year I had the privilege of visiting Dr. Frederik Schroyens in his offices in Ghent, Belgium. It was a hive of activity. A constant stream of information poured in additions, corrections, provings, translations, revisited classics and new manuscripts. Frederik explained the pyramid structure of the organization, how homoeopaths from all over the world gathered information, later passing it on to smaller teams who checked and rechecked it until it arrived at the Ghent office where the final sifting, confirming, corroborating, editing and publishing were performed. I was very impressed. From my own experience of repertorising. I have learnt to appreciate the enormous time and work that goes into each rubric, remedy, cross reference and annotation. It is the work of ants and a labour of love.

But it was not only the industriousness that impressed me. It was the dedication to detail and accuracy that filled me with a renewed confidence in the repertory. The repertory is our daily tool; it is our right arm, the gateway to materia medica and to healing. On this tool the health of our patients depends, and we must be able to rely on it in the way a carpenter relies on his plane, a soldier on his sword, a baker on his oven, a writer on her pen. It must be sharp and accurate, all-encompassing but not over- inflated. I found the Synthesis to be all these things, and the tool felt right in my hand.

Repertorising in the 21st Century provides challenges we have never faced before. The information highway traverses homoeopathy, gathering ever-increasing amounts of data from a growing number of practitioners, provings and toxicological reports. Computers have trawled the materia medica looking for lost symptoms and confirmations. This valuable information must be catalogued. But these prolific contributions create new difficulties and challenges. Such an incredible amount of new information creates a danger of inflating the rubrics and repertory to unmanageable sizes. If we stretch this sycotic tendency to its extreme, the result will be a large number of giant rubrics, each containing the same remedies and suffering from a loss of individual identity. As regards the sub-rubrics, flooding the repertory with numerous permutations of small rubrics does nothing to stem this tide. In this new era of homoeopathy we must proceed with care.