Materia Medica in the Third Year — groups, relationships and sixty-five medicines

By the third year of BHMS, a student has studied close to a hundred medicines individually: fifty in the first year, forty-eight in the second. Homoeopathic Materia Medica in the Third Professional year — HomUG-HMM-III in the NCH curriculum — adds sixty-five more. But the more important change in this year is not the number. It is the method. The third year teaches the student to see medicines in groups and in relationship, and to read their symptoms through the concepts of diathesis and miasm.

The CBDC course content is distributed across two terms, each with a foundations section and a list of medicines.

**Term I: foundations.** The term opens, as the second year did, with an assessment of entry behaviour — this time for both the first- and second-year syllabi. The curriculum keeps checking that nothing earlier has been lost.

It then introduces the importance of group study in understanding the materia medica, and the group characters of four families: the Calcareas, the Kali, the Natrum and the noble metals. A student has already met members of these groups — Calcarea Carbonica and Calcarea Phosphorica in the first year, Calcarea Arsenicosa and Calcarea Iodata in the second, the Kali and Natrum preparations in both — and group study asks them to see what the members share as well as how they differ.

The foundations continue with three further topics. The first is integrating the knowledge of Surgery, Gynaecology and Obstetrics, Practice of Medicine and Organon into the understanding of the materia medica — the same integration the second year asked for, now with the deeper clinical subjects of the third. The second is remedy relationship and concordance. The third is the use of two concepts: diathesis, in understanding the symptomatology of remedies, and miasm, correlated with that symptomatology. Both concepts are studied elsewhere in the course — diathesis in the second-year Repertory course, miasm in the Organon from the second year on and in this year’s chapter on chronic diseases — and here they are brought to bear on the medicines themselves.

**Term I: the medicines (27).** Argentum Metallicum, Aurum Metallicum, Asafoetida, Asterias Rubens, Bismuth, Bovista, Capsicum, Carbolic Acid, Caulophyllum, Collinsonia, Conium, Crocus Sativus, Cyclamen, Graphites, Helonias, Hydrastis, Iodum, Lilium Tigrinum, Murex, Muriatic Acid, Nitric Acid, Phosphoric Acid, Picric Acid, Platina, Raphanus Sativus, Ratanhia and Sulphuric Acid.

**Term II: group characters.** The second term extends group study to four more families: the acid group, the Ophidia, the spiders and the sarcodes. The first-year Pharmacy course introduced sarcodes as one of the sources of homoeopathic drugs; here they are studied as a group of medicines.

**Term II: the medicines (38).** Actea Spicata, Adrenaline, Aranea Diadema, Benzoic Acid, Bufo, Caladium, Clematis Erecta, Cholesterinum, Coca, Crotalus Horridus, Erigeron, Fluoric Acid, Kreosotum, Lachesis, Lithium Carbonicum, Millefolium, Naja Tripudians, Onosmodium, Oxalic Acid, Physostigma, Radium Bromatum, Sabal Serrulata, Sabina, Sarsaparilla, Selenium, Staphysagria, Tabacum, Taraxacum, Tarentula Cubensis, Tarentula Hispanica, Terebinthina, Thlaspi Bursa Pastoris, Theridion, Thyroidinum, Trillium Pendulum, Ustilago, Viburnum Opulus and X-Ray.

The group characters and the medicine lists are taught in the same terms, so a student studies what a group shares while meeting individual medicines in the same weeks — and can test each group’s character against the medicines themselves.

**How the year connects.** The Organon course of this year reads Hahnemann on chronic diseases and J. H. Allen on the chronic miasms, which gives the materia medica’s miasmatic reading its theory. The Repertory course studies three general repertories and asks students to identify the rubrics related to each miasm. The Pharmacology course, titled in full “Principles of Modern Pharmacology vis-à-vis Homoeopathic Materia Medica”, sets modern drug action beside the homoeopathic materia medica by design.

For a student, the year’s work is done in two directions at once: learning each new medicine, and placing it — in its group, in its relationships with medicines already known, and in the frame of diathesis and miasm.

As this room fills, a student will find pieces written to this syllabus: orientations to group study and to each of the eight groups the syllabus names, study notes on individual medicines of both terms, explainers on remedy relationship and concordance, and pieces on how diathesis and miasm are used to read a medicine’s symptoms. Everything here carries the third-year tag and the Materia Medica category, so it also stands on the Materia Medica topic in Homoeopathy Knowledge.