Organon of Medicine in the Third Year — the later aphorisms and chronic disease

The Organon course of the Third Professional year — HomUG-OM-III in the NCH curriculum — completes the reading of the text that the first two years began. A first-year student read aphorisms 1–27 and 105–145; a second-year student filled in 28–104. The third year reads Hahnemann’s preface and introduction, and then the later aphorisms, with their footnotes, in the 6th edition as translated by R. E. Dudgeon and W. Boericke. It also revises everything read in the first two years, and it adds the theory of chronic diseases. By the end of it, a student has met the Organon as a whole.

The CBDC course content has five chapters.

**Hahnemann’s preface and introduction.** It is fitting that the preface comes last in the student’s reading, not first. A reader who already knows the aphorisms can see in the preface and introduction what Hahnemann was answering, and why the book is built the way it is.

**Aphorisms 146 to 209 and 231 to 294, with footnotes.** The syllabus groups these aphorisms under five headings, which together describe the practical half of the Organon:

– the actions of medicine, and the points the text holds necessary for its purpose;
– the management of various kinds of disease — acute, chronic, surgical, one-sided, epidemic and others;
– repetition, follow-up, and prejudice in prescription;
– pharmacy, routes of administration, and some fundamental laws of homoeopathy;
– diet and regimen, and ancillary and auxiliary measures.

If the first-year aphorisms explain what the system holds and the second-year aphorisms explain how to take a case, the third-year aphorisms explain what follows the case: how Hahnemann understood the physician’s next decisions, and their follow-up. Several of these headings echo earlier subjects. Pharmacy and routes of administration, for example, were studied in first-year Pharmacy, which also read the Organon’s related aphorisms on posology.

**Philosophy.** The philosophy chapter gathers five concepts: susceptibility; idiosyncrasy; palliation and suppression; remedy reaction and the second prescription; and posology. Susceptibility and suppression were introduced in the second year; here they return with more depth. Remedy reaction and the second prescription are new, and they belong to this year for a reason — they concern what the physician observes after a first prescription, which is exactly where the third-year aphorisms lead.

**The Hahnemannian classification of disease, revisited.** The second-year course introduced this classification. The third year returns to it for “further insight and correlation with scope and limitation” — two topics, the scope of homoeopathy and the general pathology of homoeopathy. The curriculum’s language is worth noting. It asks the student to understand the system’s scope and its limits together, as a clinician must.

**Chronic diseases.** The course ends with Hahnemann’s theory of chronic diseases and with J. H. Allen’s The Chronic Miasms — psora and pseudo-psora, and sycosis. Miasm has been present in the curriculum since first-year Anatomy’s integration of genetics with miasmatic influence and the second-year Organon’s introduction to miasm. Here it is studied from its primary sources.

**How the year connects.** Every homoeopathic subject of the third year leans on this one. The Materia Medica course correlates the knowledge of miasms with the symptomatology of remedies. The Repertory course asks students to identify the rubrics related to each miasm in three general repertories. The clinical subjects speak of scope, limitation and referral — the same themes this course studies in the classification of disease.

For a student, the third-year Organon is the point at which the parts become a whole. It is worth reading the later aphorisms slowly, with the footnotes, and then returning to the early aphorisms with fresh eyes. The revision the curriculum asks for is more than repetition; the early text reads differently once the later text is known.

As this room fills, a student will find pieces written to this syllabus: guided readings of the later aphorisms under each of the five headings, study notes on the preface and introduction, explainers on the philosophy chapter’s concepts, orientations to Hahnemann’s and Allen’s accounts of chronic disease, and revision pieces that set the first- and second-year aphorisms beside the third. Everything here carries the third-year tag and the Organon category, so it also stands on the Organon topic in Homoeopathy Knowledge.