Repertory and Case Taking in the Fourth Year — methods, clinical repertories and software

Over four years, the Repertory and Case Taking course has moved in a steady line. The first year taught what a repertory is and introduced Kent’s. The second demonstrated case taking and added Boericke’s. The third taught case processing according to Boenninghausen, Kent and Boger, and studied three general repertories. The Fourth Professional course — HomUG-R-IV in the NCH curriculum — completes the line. It demonstrates the methods of repertorisation in full, carries the process through to the selection of a medicine and the second prescription, and extends the student’s range to puritan, clinical and software-based repertories.

The CBDC course content has two chapters, one per term.

**Term 1: demonstration of repertorisation methods.** This chapter follows the working sequence of a case from its record to its follow-up.

It begins with record keeping — defining the method and schedule for keeping records. The Organon’s aphorism 104, read in the second year, asked the physician to keep a record; here the Repertory course makes that record a working instrument, with a method and a schedule.

It then demonstrates the cross-repertorisation method, and asks the student to differentiate between the total-addition, elimination and keynote methods of repertorisation. The third-year course taught the medium, method, process and technique of repertorisation in general; the fourth year sets particular methods side by side so that the student can choose among them for a given case.

The chapter then turns to selection. It asks the student to use the potential differential field — a term first defined in the first year and constructed in the third — for the final selection of the simillimum, and to demonstrate the analysis of the repertorial result in finalising the simillimum in consultation with the materia medica. The phrase “in consultation with Materia Medica” is important. The curriculum teaches the repertory as an index that points back into the materia medica, never as a machine that decides on its own. The first-year syllabus said the same when it named the repertory’s limitations.

Finally, the chapter asks the student to apply the relationship of remedies in making a second prescription. Remedy relationships were studied in the third-year Materia Medica course; the second prescription in the third-year Organon course. Here they meet in the repertory, where the follow-up of a case is worked through in practice.

**Term 2: puritan, clinical and software-based repertories.** The second term widens the student’s instruments.

It covers the use of puritan repertories in acute and chronic cases. The first-year terminology chapter named the puritan repertory as one of the classes of repertory; the third year studied classification in depth; the fourth year applies it.

It covers the application of clinical repertories across the clinical subjects of the course: Practice of Medicine, including rheumatology; Surgery, including ENT, dentistry and ophthalmology; and Obstetrics and Gynaecology. These are the subjects whose syllabi the student has been studying since the second year, and the third-year Repertory course had already asked students to locate rubrics related to them in the general repertories.

And it covers the use of software-based repertories for acute and chronic cases. The curriculum places software last, after four years of learning how repertories are built and how cases are processed, which is the right order: a student who understands the method can judge what a program is doing.

**What the four years add up to.** By the end of this course, a student has studied several repertories, three philosophies of case processing, the full vocabulary of the discipline, several methods of repertorisation, and the route from a recorded case to a selected medicine and its follow-up. The internship that follows is where that method meets the rotatory clinical postings.

As this room fills, a student will find pieces written to this syllabus: walk-throughs that set the total-addition, elimination and keynote methods side by side, explainers on cross-repertorisation and the potential differential field, study notes on record keeping and the second prescription, and orientations to puritan, clinical and software-based repertories as the syllabus frames them. Everything here carries the fourth-year tag and the Repertory category, so it also stands on the Repertory topic in Homoeopathy Knowledge.