Homeopathic remedies have hundreds, sometimes thousands of indications. Remembering all of the symptoms for the remedy Sulphur (2000+ symptoms in Hahnemann’s Materia Medica!) alone, let alone the hundreds of other remedies, would be an impressive mental feat. To help us poor homeopaths out, we have what are called repertories. As far as I can tell, only homeopaths use this word in this way. It means an index, or place to find information. In a repertory, there are entries, called rubrics, which show all the remedies that have a particular symptom. If someone comes in with fatigue, you look up fatigue in the repertory, and it will list the remedies that have “fatigue” as an indication. Historically they (of course) were books, but now most homeopaths use software.

History:

Hahnemann was the first to try and create a repertory, but he didn’t like his own efforts. His student, Boenninghausen, came up with the first work with the word repertory in the title. His first repertory, the Systematic Alphabetic Repertory of Homeopathic Medicines, was the basis for almost every single repertory that came after it. In other words, the format and some of the remedy entries all came from this one work.

Interestingly, he was dissatisfied with it, and came up with a second work, the Therapeutic Pocketbook, which has been translated into English a few times, most recently by the Hahnemann Institute in Sydney. Boenninghausen was dissatisfied as he tried to update his first remedy, that as he tried to be more and more complete, the work was growing to such a huge size that it was not practical to use (remember this was also before computers!). You can read his account of this process in his introduction to his Pocketbook (uploaded here). The format he came up with for the Pocketbook is slightly different, and how you use it is definitely different than other repertories, so a lot of this post won’t apply to the Pocketbook and its various translations.

Format:

The major chapters generally go from head to toe, followed by more general symptoms. However, it goes head, internal and external, then throat internal and external, abdomen internal (including all digestive and urinary functions), pelvic (and reproductive), and then back up to the respiratory system (cough, respiration, chest), then the back and then extremities. Each large chapter is then broken into rubrics, which are followed by smaller sub-rubrics. So the symptom back pain is found in the back chapter under “pain”. Back pain worse in the morning is found under “back (chapter), pain (rubric), morning aggravates (subrubric). As you go down the subrubrics, you get more and more specific. For example, you could have “aching back pain, worse rising in the morning” which would be: back (chapter), pain(first rubric), aching pain (subrubric 1), morning (subrubric 2), rising on (subrubric 3). A large part of the art of using the repertory is in selecting how particular or not particular you want to be with your rubrics.

The repertory’s purpose:

The repertory allows us to quickly see which remedies have the symptoms we need. However! They were put together by people in an attempt to approximate the information in the materia medica. In other words, this is a fallible tool. There is no repertory that has given explicit information on why each remedy is in the rubric the author put it in. This means we may disagree with an author’s decision to put a remedy in one rubric but not another. It also means that it is imperative to read the materia medica, and not just trust what the repertory tells us. It’s also imperative that we become familiar with materia medicas - their language, their structure, and how to use them - because they are ultimately what we need to base our prescriptions on. The repertory is a sign post towards the right remedy, but nothing more.