Materia Medica in the Second Year — forty-eight medicines, read with pathology

In the first year, Materia Medica taught a student how to read a medicine. In the second, the curriculum asks them to read more widely and more deeply at once: a new set of medicines, and a new set of subjects to read them against. Homoeopathic Materia Medica in the Second Professional year — HomUG-HMM-II in the NCH curriculum — is where the materia medica begins to be read alongside the study of disease.

The CBDC course content has two chapters. The first is short and does a great deal; the second is the list of medicines.

**The introductory lectures** open with something unusual in a syllabus: an assessment of entry behaviour for the first-year syllabus. Before new material arrives, the curriculum checks what the student carries forward — the definitions, the fifty medicines, the biochemic salts of the first year. It is a reminder that this subject is cumulative. Nothing learned in the first year is left behind.

The lectures then introduce different approaches to studying homoeopathic materia medica. A student who has so far met medicines one at a time now learns that there is more than one way to hold the material, and that the approach chosen shapes what one sees.

The third introductory topic is the one that gives the year its character: integrating the knowledge of Pathology, Toxicology, Practice of Medicine, Surgery and Gynaecology-Obstetrics into a better understanding of the materia medica. Every one of those subjects is taught in the same Second Professional year. The curriculum is asking for something specific — that the student read a medicine’s picture with the new vocabulary of disease and injury they are learning in the next lecture hall.

**The homoeopathic medicines** of the second year are forty-eight, and the list is worth reading slowly because it sets the year’s work. It runs:

Acetic Acid, Actea Racemosa, Aesculus Hippocastanum, Agaricus Muscarius, Agnus Castus, Alumina, Ambra Grisea, Anacardium Orientalis, Antimonium Arsenicosum, Apocynum Cannabinum, Arsenicum Iodatum, Argentum Nitricum, Baptisia Tinctoria, Berberis Vulgaris, Bellis Perennis, Bromium, Cactus Grandiflorus, Calcarea Arsenicosa, Calcarea Iodata, Camphora, Cannabis Indica, Cannabis Sativa, Cantharis, Carduus Marianus, Causticum, Ceanothus Americanus, Chelidonium Majus, Chininum Arsenicosum, Digitalis Purpurea, Echinacea Angustifolia, Equisetum Hyemale, Ferrum Metallicum, Helleborus Niger, Hyoscyamus Niger, Kali Bichromicum, Kali Bromatum, Kali Carbonicum, Moschus, Nux Moschata, Opium, Petroleum, Phosphorus, Secale Cornutum, Sepia, Stramonium, Thuja Occidentalis, Urtica Urens and Veratrum Album.

The curriculum distributes these across the two terms of the year.

A few patterns in the list reward attention. Several medicines share a family name with first-year medicines — the Calcarea and Kali preparations, the arsenicum compounds — and studying them against their first-year relatives is one of the natural ways into the second-year list. Pairs such as Cannabis Indica and Cannabis Sativa, or Kali Bichromicum, Kali Bromatum and Kali Carbonicum, invite the comparative reading the first year began to teach. And the Pharmacy course of the first year, with its chapter on sources of drugs from the plant, animal and mineral kingdoms, gives the student a way to group these medicines by origin.

The connections to the rest of the year are written into the curriculum itself. The Organon course of this year studies case taking and the evaluation of symptoms, which is how a medicine’s picture meets a patient’s story. The Repertory course introduces Boericke’s repertory and studies how pathologies are represented in Boericke and Kent. Pathology, Toxicology and the three clinical subjects supply the language the introductory lectures ask the student to integrate.

For a student, the practical shape of the year is this: forty-eight new pictures to learn, fifty old ones to keep alive, and a growing clinical vocabulary to read them with. The work is steady rather than dramatic, and it compounds.

As this room fills, a student will find pieces written to this syllabus: study notes on individual medicines of the second-year list, comparisons between related medicines across the first and second years, orientations to the different approaches to studying materia medica that the introductory lectures name, and pieces that show how a second-year student can read a medicine alongside what they are learning in pathology. Everything here carries the second-year tag and the Materia Medica category, so it also stands on the Materia Medica topic in Homoeopathy Knowledge. The shelf is being written in order, and the list above is its plan.