Surgery in the Third Year — the organ systems, from vessels to eye and teeth

The first part of Surgery, in the second year, laid the general foundations: trauma, wounds, haemorrhage, shock, fluid balance, burns, infections, swellings, and — at its very start — the scope and limitations of homoeopathy in surgical conditions, with surgical disease read in relation to the Organon. The second part — HomUG-Sur-II in the NCH curriculum — takes those foundations into the organ systems. It is a regional and systemic survey of surgical disease across the body, and it also brings in three specialties that are often taught separately: orthopaedics, ophthalmology and dentistry.

The CBDC course content lists ten chapters. The source gives them at chapter level, with the organs each chapter covers named in its title and no separate topic lists; this orientation stays with those names.

**The ten chapters.**

1. Diseases of blood vessels and nerves — arteries, veins, lymphatics and peripheral nerves.
2. Diseases of the alimentary tract — the palate, cheek, tongue and floor of the mouth; the oesophagus; the peritoneum and retroperitoneal space; the stomach and duodenum; the small and large intestine; and the rectum and anal canal.
3. Diseases of the liver, gall bladder, bile duct, pancreas and spleen.
4. Orthopaedics.
5. Diseases of the thorax, heart and pericardium.
6. Diseases of the urogenital system — kidney, urinary bladder, prostate, urethra, penis, scrotum and testes.
7. ENT, thyroid and other neck swellings.
8. Diseases of the breast.
9. Ophthalmology.
10. Dentistry.

**How to read the list.** The chapter titles follow the body in a way a student will recognise from first-year Anatomy, whose regional chapters covered the upper and lower extremities, thorax, abdomen and pelvis, head and neck, and brain. Almost every organ named here was first studied there, in structure, and in Physiology, in function. The second-year Pathology course then studied disease in general and systemic terms. Third-year Surgery asks the student to bring those three layers — structure, function, disease — to bear on the conditions that come to surgical attention.

The three specialty chapters deserve a word. Orthopaedics, ophthalmology and dentistry are fields of their own, and here they are introduced as part of a general medical education — so that a student learns to recognise the conditions that belong to them and when a patient needs a specialist.

**The frame from the first part.** The second-year syllabus put the scope and limitations of homoeopathy in surgical conditions at the head of the whole subject. That frame carries into the third year. The purpose of studying surgical disease in a BHMS degree is to recognise it, understand it, and know which cases need surgical care — a physician’s judgement, exercised honestly. The Organon course of the same year reads Hahnemann on the management of various kinds of disease, surgical among them, and returns to the Hahnemannian classification of disease “with scope and limitation”; the two subjects speak to each other.

**Where the subject connects.** The third-year Repertory course asks students to identify chapters and locate rubrics for symptoms and conditions related to Surgery. The Materia Medica course asks them to integrate the knowledge of Surgery into their understanding of the materia medica. And the Practice of Medicine course of the same year covers several of the same systems — digestive, hepatobiliary, renal — from the medical side, which makes the medical and surgical views of one organ easy to study together.

A note on how this room is written. Pieces here are study material. They describe surgical disease and the syllabus’s structure; they do not suggest that any surgical condition be managed by homoeopathy, and they offer no treatment advice.

As this room fills, a student will find pieces written to this syllabus: orientations to each of the ten chapters, review notes that pair each organ system with its first-year anatomy and second-year pathology, introductions to the three specialty chapters, and pieces on the scope-and-limitation frame that the subject’s first part established. Everything here carries the third-year tag and the Surgery category, and sits beside the second-year room for the same subject.