Concordant Materia Medica

Author: Frans Vermeulen
Cover: Hardback
ISBN: 9076189021
Pages: 1684
Printed in: The Netherlands
Size: 155 x 223mm

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From the Preface To the Millenium Edition

This Millenium Edition of the Concordant embraces both an extension and a revision of the second English edition. Phatak's additions have been replaced by the original ones, mainly coming from the texts of Hering, Clarke, Kent and Pulford. Yet the general idea behind the Concordant has remained unchanged. What I wrote in 1994 as an introduction therefore still applies:

"This book contains the maximum number of reliable Materia Medica facts in the mini- mum space," Boericke writes in the foreword of his celebrated Materia Medica.

Given the number of good Materia Medicas available, I feel it is time that the maximum number of reliable symptoms was extended, without resulting in an extra metre of book space on every homoeopath's bookshelf.

With this aim - the compilation of a complete but portable Materia Medica - I began by asking myself which authors I should include. The information and the sources they used would have to be reliable and should not be just a duplicate of the work of others.

Experience shows that many Materia Medicas are almost identical, although there is no objection to this as long as they complement each other and provide nuances and complete symptoms.

This is how I arrived at my plan to compare the writings of a large number of authors in order to gain a more complete symptom picture. Completeness is not a question of quantity, of more symptoms per remedy, but of quality, of a detailed examination of each symptom.

Preferably, therefore, with a clear description of localization, sensation, modalities, pains extending and concomitant phenomena. Taken separately, not one of the authors satisfies this criterion, with the exception, of course, of Hering's ten-volume Materia Medica.

If, however, one uses a single basic text - in this case Boericke - and then supplements it with the observations of other authors, thousands of pages of symptoms can be reduced to a handy format, which is the aim of this book.

After painstakingly comparing numerous Materia Medicas to discover which ones complement each other, I arrived at seven which met this requirement. By omitting repetitions, I was able, as it were, to paste the various descriptions together.

Having gone through 3807 pages of text written by the seven authors below, as well as Clarke's Dictionary and Kent's Repertory, I was finally left with the repetition-free symptoms that are contained in the pages of this Concordant Materia Medica.

The authors I decided on are T.F. Allen, Boericke, Boger, Clarke, Cowperthwaite, Lippe, and Pulford. I have used the following Materia Medicas: I include a brief biography of each of the authors I opted for.

Structure of Concordant
The starting point for this book is Boericke's Pocket Manual. His complete text has been used and, where necessary, corrected, since Boericke was not always totally accurate when classifying symptoms in rubrics.

I came across some remarkable - and sometimes amusing - mistakes, such as "Sensitive to odours" included in the Eyes rubric, mental symptoms under Head and problems with stool under Stomach, to mention but a few. I have placed every symptom in the correct rubric, retaining to a great extent the structure of Kent's Repertory.

Where symptoms from the Pocket Manual were too incomplete, and to avoid getting bogged down in a jumble of codes by supplementing those of other authors, I replaced them by the complete symptom as mentioned by another author. Boericke derived his symptoms mainly from the Guiding Symptoms. Besides inaccurate Boericke's Pocket Manual turned out to be so incomplete that revisions were necessary quite often.

Sometimes hiatuses in symptoms given by other authors also made additions or cor- rections necessary. Phatak, for instance, mentions under Lachesis the symptom "Cramps in calves from fear."

This peculiar phenomenon only makes sense when we know the original symptom, as mentioned by Hering: "Cramps in calves from fear of cholera." Since such cramps belong to cholera, the symptom illustrates the power of imagination of Lachesis.

"Tingling pain in shafts of tibia at night when feet are covered," is a symptom given by Cowperthwaite, under Extremities of Rhus toxicodendron. Though apparently quite a peculiar symptom, it proved to be a printing error. In Hering's Guiding Symptoms we can find that the proper modality must be "when feet are crossed."

New Rubrics
By adding the symptoms from both Hering's Condensed and Guiding Symptoms some rubrics grow so huge that they became cluttered. For that reason the number of rubrics has been enlarged in the second edition.

The Eyes rubric has been split up in two separate rubrics called Eyes and Vision. Likewise with the Ears rubric in Ears and Hearing. Preceding the Stomach rubric a new rubric called Food & Drink has been introduced. It contains information about appetite, thirst, smoking, aversions and cravings, as well as the effects of eating and drinking in general and of specific foodstuffs and beverages in particular.

The Mouth rubric is subdivided into Mouth and Teeth. Symptoms related to the gums are placed under Teeth. The Respiratory rubric has been subdivided into three new ones: Respiration, Cough, and Sputum (Expectoration].

The addition of Hering's symptoms threatened to put the Limbs rubric out of joint. It is therefore replaced by a trio: Limbs [in general], Upper [limbs] and Lower [limbs]. The Lower [limbs] rubric usually exceeds the Upper [limbs] rubric in size.

Wherever this is not the case - like in Crotalus horridus, Lobelia, Sanguinaria, Stannum, Ustilago and Viola odorata - it offers interesting clues. The Sleep rubric is followed by a new rubric called Dreams.

In the old books the words Fever and Heat seem to be interchangeable. However, in the strict sense of the word they must be differentiated.

Fever includes the mixture or succession of three stages: heat (hot stage], chill [cold stage] and perspiration (sweating stage]. Information about all three stages, or about fever in general, I have placed in the rubric Fever.

The Chill rubric contains the cold stage as such (Chill] and the sensitiveness to cold [Chilliness]. The Heat rubric covers the hot stage of fever, and warmbloodedness in general. The circumstances and modalities of perspiration are placed in the Sweat rubric.

Symptoms related to the heart and circulation are in a separate rubric, called Heart; these symptoms are in the Chest rubric in Kent's Repertory. I have not placed symptoms related to the prostate gland in the Urinary rubric; instead, I have classified them under the male sexual organs [Male].

The head to toe classification is used throughout, preceded by a rubric which, in Boericke, directly follows the name of the remedy and, in Allen, Cowperthwaite etc., has the header "Generalities".

I have amalgamated these two rubrics into a rubric I call "Characteristics", which contains the generalities and the typical [general or local] symptoms of a remedy.

About the author:
Frans Vermeulen was born in July, 1948 in Den Helder, Holland. He graduated from teachers training college in 1970. He worked as a schoolteacher until 1978 and had already started to study homeopathy at Stichting Klassieke Homeopathie in Den Haag. He continued to study homeopathy until 1983 although he had been running his practice since 1979.

Frans started to translate homeopathic books for work and pleasure. Between 1983 and 1996 he translated English and German homeopathic books, including Kent, Allen, Hering, Boericke, Borland, Tyler, Vithoulkas, Voegeli, Whitmont, Miles, Morgan and Kohler.

In 1985 he wrote Kindertypes in Homoeopathie (Children's Types in Homoeopathy), based on his experiences as both a teacher and a homoeopath.

In 1990 he was appointed managing director, teacher, and administrator of The School of Homeopathy in Holland. In 1992 he wrote Synoptic Materia Medica 1 which originally emerged from remedy summaries made for the students in Holland, Ireland and Finland.

He followed this one up with the Concordant Materia Medica published in 1994. Followed by a second edition of the Concordant, including Hering's Guiding Symptoms in 1997; a third edition was printed in 2000.

Out of his special interest in the small remedies, Frans wrote Synoptic Materia Medica 2. In his recent Materia Medica tour de force entitled PRISMA, he introduces us to data from numerous non-homoeopathic sources as both reference material for the homoeopathic materia medica and as the source of potential symptoms. The significance and potential of such external data has been the subject of his numerous seminars in Europe, Israel and Australia.

And finally, in 2005, Frans published an astounding 800 page book focused on the Materia Medica of bacteria and viruses, entitled Monera. He followed it early in 2007 with volume 2, another heroic work of scholarship on Fungi.

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