Repertory and Case Taking in MD (Homoeopathy) — every repertory, how it was made and what it is for

In BHMS, Repertory and Case Taking runs through all four professional years, as R-I to R-IV. The MD speciality in Homoeopathic Repertory and Case Taking widens that study into a library. It studies the repertory as a kind of book with a history — many books, each built on a philosophy, each with a use and a limit — and it studies the case that the repertory serves. It is one of the seven Part II specialities of the NCH Competency Based Dynamic Curriculum for MD (Homoeopathy), from the 2024-25 batch; MGGAU examines it as “Repertory”.

The course runs three years under the 2024 Post-Graduate Regulations: Part I, about eighteen months, as a Junior Resident, and Part II as a Senior Resident. One note on the source: the Commission’s curriculum document for this speciality is a scanned PDF without a text layer, so our sheet was transcribed by reading the pages. The module names and topics below are from that transcription.

**Part I, Paper 1 — Fundamentals of Homoeopathic Repertory and Case Taking.** Nine modules.

– **The concept.** The repertory as a database of symptoms drawn from the materia medica, and as a decision-making tool that demonstrates evidence-based homoeopathic practice.
– **History and terms.** The need that produced repertories, the development of their kinds, and the scientific background of that development; then the genesis and interpretation of the terminology used across the repertories of Boenninghausen, Kent, Boger, Boericke, Murphy, Knerr, and the Synthesis and Synthetic repertories.
– **The symptom.** The types of symptoms, their classification according to the masters, and how each repertory represents them.
– **The case.** A full module on case taking in different settings: its purpose, the route to clinical and differential diagnosis, the science and art of taking acute cases and chronic, psychosomatic and mental ones. It asks the scholar to identify the pace of the disease, the patient’s susceptibility, the patient as a person and why the person is suffering — and to arrive at the set of symptoms that should be repertorised.
– **Analysis.** The analysis and evaluation of symptoms according to Boenninghausen, Kent and Boger; and case analysis — whether a case is acute or chronic, mental or physical, miasmatic or surgical, and what the scope of homoeopathy is in it.
– **Repertorisation.** Its concept and methods across the masters’ writings; arranging symptoms to suit the philosophy the case calls for; recognising cases that do not need philosophical repertorisation; and organising symptoms into what the curriculum names the Repertorial Syndrome and the Potential Differential Field.
– **The philosophical repertories.** The last module studies three in depth: Boenninghausen’s Therapeutic Pocket Book (in T. F. Allen’s edition), Kent’s Repertory of the Homoeopathic Materia Medica, and Boger’s Boenninghausen’s Characteristic Repertory.

That last module sets the pattern for the rest of the course. For each repertory it asks the same questions: its source and origin and its editions; its author’s background and how that shaped it; its chapters, the structure of its rubrics, its unique rubrics and the number of remedies it holds; the differences between editions and the reasons for them; and where it is useful and where it is not. It adds two practical skills — reading a patient’s verbal and non-verbal communication and giving it logical meaning, and checking cross references against the case.

**Part I, Paper 2 — the clinical bridge.** Five modules on clinical medicine in relation to repertory: evidence-based practice, a basic clinical approach, the cardinal manifestations of disease with their Hahnemannian and miasmatic classification and their representation in the repertory, nutrition with its relevant rubrics, and the interpretation of investigations.

**Part I, Paper 3** is the Research Methodology and Biostatistics paper common to every MD speciality.

**Part II — four families of repertories.** Each of the four Part II modules applies the same study points to a family of works.

– **Clinical and Puritan repertories** — Boericke’s Materia Medica with Repertory, Phatak’s Concise Repertory, Clarke’s Prescriber and his Clinical Repertory, H. A. Roberts’s Sensation As If and The Rheumatic Remedies, Hering’s Analytical Repertory of the Symptoms of the Mind, and Knerr’s Repertory of Hering’s Guiding Symptoms. This module adds one more question: how to tell two similar repertories apart.
– **Post-Kentian repertories** — among them Kunzli’s Repertorium Generale, the Final General Repertory of Pierre Schmidt and Diwan Harishchandra, the Comparative Repertory of Dockx and Kokelenberg, Schroyens’s Essential Synthesis, the Synthetic Repertory of Barthal and Klunker, Murphy’s Homoeopathic Medical Repertory, Boger’s Additions to Kent’s Repertory and his Synoptic Key, Lippe’s repertory, and van Zandvoort’s Complete Repertory.
– **Regional repertories** — works written for one field of practice: among them Bell on diarrhoea, H. C. Allen on fever, Borland on pneumonias, Yingling’s Accoucheur’s Emergency Manual, Minton’s Uterine Therapeutics, Lee and Clarke on cough and expectoration, and Boger’s Time of Remedies and Moon Phases.
– **Software-based repertories** — their origin and upgrades, features and applications, their scope and limits in clinical practice, the skill of choosing rubrics and the logic of interpretation, and a comparison with the philosophical repertories.

**Who this speciality forms.** The curriculum describes a scholar who treats every repertory as a constructed thing: who knows who built it, from what, on which philosophy, and therefore when it can be trusted and when it cannot — and who knows the case well enough to choose the right instrument. It is a speciality of method; its closing module carries that method into software-based repertories.

**What this room will hold.** Study notes following the CBDC modules: orientations to each repertory the curriculum names, built on its own study points; pieces on symptom classification and evaluation across Boenninghausen, Kent and Boger; and notes on case taking and case analysis. Everything here carries the MD tag and the Repertory category, so it also stands on the Repertory topic in Homoeopathy Knowledge.