Lesson 1 of 12
What a Repertory Is and What It Is Not
The mental model of a repertory — its purpose, its limits, and how it relates to materia medica.
Welcome to the repertory course. By the end of the twelfth lesson, you will have repertorized at least five real cases and will have a clear working sense of how the repertory fits into your overall practice.
What a repertory is A repertory is a reverse-lookup index of homeopathic symptoms. The materia medica is organized by remedy — you look up Aconite and find its symptoms. The repertory is organized by symptom — you look up "fever, sudden onset, cold dry wind, midnight" and find the remedies that have produced that symptom in provings or clinical observation.
The same information is in both works. The repertory just inverts the lookup direction.
Why the inversion matters When you take a case, you do not start with a remedy in mind. You start with symptoms. The patient says "sudden fever, restless, fear something terrible is happening, midnight onset." You need to find which remedies match that symptom picture. Without a repertory, you would have to read through every materia medica entry and check whether it matches — impossibly slow with 300+ commonly-used remedies, let alone the thousands in the broader literature.
The repertory turns "which remedies match these symptoms" from an hours-long reading exercise into a 20-30 minute structured lookup.
What a repertory is not The repertory is not the materia medica. It is a finding tool. After a repertorization narrows the field to four or five candidate remedies, you go back to the materia medica to read about each one and choose. The repertory does not tell you which of the candidates is right; it tells you which deserve consideration.
The repertory is also not infallible. The rubrics in the repertory reflect the experience and recording choices of homeopaths over the past two centuries. Some rubrics are well-developed and trustworthy; others are sparse or peculiar to a single source. Knowing which is which is part of intermediate skill.
Kent's Repertory specifically James Tyler Kent's Repertory of the Homeopathic Materia Medica was first published in 1897. It became the dominant English-language repertory for most of the 20th century and is still the foundation of nearly all modern repertories. The structure: rubrics organized by section of the body (Mind, Vertigo, Head, Eye, Vision, Ear, Hearing, Nose, Face, Mouth, Teeth, Throat, External Throat, Stomach, Abdomen, Rectum, Stool, Bladder, Urine, Kidneys, Prostate, Urethra, Male, Female, Voice, Cough, Respiration, Chest, Back, Extremities, Sleep, Chill, Fever, Sweat, Skin, and Generalities). Within each section, rubrics descend from broad to specific.
Each rubric lists remedies in one of three grades: - Grade 1 (italics): a few proven cases or moderate clinical experience - Grade 2 (small caps, sometimes called "Roman" or "bold"): more frequent or stronger - Grade 3 (CAPITALS, sometimes called "bold caps" or "very bold"): the most strongly associated remedies
The grade reflects how confident the editor was about that remedy's association with that symptom. A Grade 3 remedy in a rubric is much more strongly indicated than a Grade 1.
Modern repertories Several modern repertories build on Kent: the Murphy Repertory (an organized rewrite of Kent with modern terminology and additions), the Synthesis Repertory (a major modern edition incorporating multiple sources), and the Complete Repertory. Software versions (Hompath, Radar, MacRepertory, RadarOpus) allow rapid searching, weighted analysis, and easy combination of rubrics.
For learning purposes, this course uses the Kent Repertory as the reference, because its structure is the foundation everything else inherits. The lessons transfer directly to any modern repertory you might use.
What "using a repertory" looks like in practice You take a case. You write down the modalities, concomitants, and peculiars. You then pick three to seven rubrics that capture the most characteristic features of the case. You look up each rubric. You write down the remedies that appear in two or more of your chosen rubrics. You note their grades. The remedies that appear in multiple rubrics at high grades are your candidates. You then go to the materia medica to choose among them.
This is the workflow. The course teaches the skill at each step.
Common beginner mistakes with repertories Mistake one: using too many rubrics, especially common ones. A rubric like "Headache" includes hundreds of remedies; adding it to a repertorization does not narrow the field. Useful rubrics are specific.
Mistake two: weighting all rubrics equally. The peculiar symptom should weight more than the common one. The modality should weight more than the location. Software allows explicit weighting; in hand repertorization, you weight by which rubrics you include and how heavily you consider them in interpretation.
Mistake three: trusting the repertory result over the materia medica. The repertory points to candidates; the materia medica picks the one. A remedy that scores highly in a repertorization but does not match the case picture overall when read in the materia medica is not the right remedy.