The First Professional Year — a map of where BHMS begins

The First Professional year of BHMS runs eighteen months — longer than a calendar year, and deliberately so. It is the widest year of the course: eight subjects taught side by side, some of them the foundations of medicine itself, some of them the foundations of homoeopathy in particular, and a few that sit quietly between the two. Entry comes through NEET-UG, at the 50th percentile with category relaxations, and from the 2023–24 academic year onwards the professional years also carry electives — a minimum of two in the First Professional.

If you are starting this year, the most useful thing to hold in mind is that the eight subjects are not eight separate journeys. They are one journey seen from eight directions, and the curriculum is built so that they keep meeting each other. Here is the map.

**Homoeopathic Materia Medica** is where the study of medicines begins. The first-year portion opens with what a materia medica is — how a homoeopathic materia medica differs from a general one, its sources and construction — and then settles into the medicines themselves: a set of fifty foundational remedies studied one by one, alongside the twelve biochemic tissue salts and the theory of the biochemic system. This subject continues in every later year; the first year lays its floor.

**Organon of Medicine with Homoeopathic Philosophy** is the course’s spine of principle. It starts with the history of medicine and of homoeopathy — Hahnemann’s life and the situation that led to his discovery, and the contributions of Boenninghausen, Hering, Kent and the Indian pioneers — then moves through the fundamental principles, the concepts of life, health, disease and cure, lectures on inductive and deductive logic, and a close reading of aphorisms 1–27 and 105–145 of the Organon.

**Repertory and Case Taking** begins gently in the first year: what a repertory is, why it exists, its uses and limits, the vocabulary of the discipline — rubric, gradation, cross reference, totality — and a first structured look at Kent’s Repertory, including how its chapters correlate with anatomy, physiology and psychology.

**Homoeopathic Pharmacy** is the largest single syllabus of the year, thirty-two chapters that take a drug from its source to a finished, standardised, legally compliant medicine: sources and collection, vehicles, mother tinctures, the scales of potentisation, dynamisation, posology, prescription and dispensing, and onward to pharmacopoeias, quality control, industrial practice and the legislation that governs it all.

**Anatomy, Histology and Embryology** is the body itself, region by region — upper and lower extremity, thorax, abdomen and pelvis, head and neck, the brain — with general anatomy, embryology and histology woven through, and even a bridge back to homoeopathic thinking in its handling of genetics alongside the concept of miasmatic influence.

**Physiology and Biochemistry** explains how that body works: fourteen chapters running from cellular physiology and bio-physical sciences through blood, nerve and muscle, the cardiovascular, respiratory, nervous, endocrine, reproductive, digestive and renal systems, the special senses, and a full biochemistry section on carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, enzymes, vitamins and minerals.

**Fundamentals of Psychology in relation to Homoeopathy** is a subject many students do not expect, and come to value. It studies mind the way this system needs it studied — thought, feeling and behaviour, emotion, intellect, motivation, learning, personality and conflict — and at nearly every step it asks how these appear in the materia medica and the repertory.

**Fundamentals of Yoga** closes the list: the philosophy and history of yoga, asana, pranayama, meditation and kriya, their practical learning, and two chapters that speak directly to a homoeopathic student — the correlation of vital force and prana, and yoga read through Hahnemann’s accessory circumstances.

Each of these subjects has its own room on this platform — a place where notes, explainers and study pieces for exactly this year and exactly that subject will gather as they are written. The year page you are reading is the hallway; the rooms open off it. They are filling gradually, in the order the community writes them, so a quiet room today is simply one whose turn has not yet come.

What you will not find here is panic. The first professional year is long because it has real work in it, and the honest way to serve that work is depth: pieces that follow the NCH Competency Based Dynamic Curriculum chapter by chapter — written patiently, and written to be checked against the syllabus itself.