What is a homeopathic repertory?

A homeopathic repertory is an index of symptoms. Each entry — a rubric — names a symptom in standardised language and lists the remedies whose provings, toxicology, or clinical records report that symptom, graded by the strength of the evidence behind each listing. The repertory exists because no practitioner can hold the materia medica in working memory: Hering's Guiding Symptoms alone runs to ten volumes, and the modern Complete Repertory indexes more than 200,000 rubrics. The repertory inverts the materia medica — instead of reading remedy-by-remedy, the practitioner reads symptom-by-symptom and lets the index point back to candidate remedies.

A short history: from Boenninghausen's index to the digital corpus

Hahnemann kept a private symptom index, but the first published, practice-grade repertory is Clemens von Boenninghausen's Repertory of the Antipsoric Medicines (1832), refined into the Therapeutic Pocket Book of 1846. Boenninghausen's wager was structural: a symptom can be decomposed into location, sensation, modality, and concomitant, and those components can be recombined — generalised — across the case. Kent rejected part of that wager. His Repertory of the Homoeopathic Materia Medica (1897) organises symptoms anatomically and hierarchically, from generals down to particulars, and preserves the symptom as found rather than decomposing it. Boger's Synoptic Key (1915) sits between the two, compressing Boenninghausen's method into a one-volume working tool.

The twentieth century closed with two synthetic projects: Frederik Schroyens's Synthesis (first edition 1987, built on Kent's skeleton) and Roger van Zandvoort's Complete Repertory (1994 onward, now in annually revised editions). The twenty-first added Robin Murphy's clinically re-ordered MetaRepertory and André Saine's Saine Repertory (2025), built from re-verified primary sources. Every one of these now ships primarily as a database inside software rather than as a bound book.

The major repertories at a glance

Anatomy of a repertory: chapters, rubrics, grades

Every major edition shares the same three structural layers.

Chapters. Kent's schema runs from Mind through Vertigo, Head, Eye, and onward to Generalities — roughly head-to-foot, with mental symptoms first and whole-body symptoms last. Murphy's MetaRepertory replaces that schema with alphabetical clinical chapters so a prescriber can look up "Headaches" directly.

Rubrics and sub-rubrics. A rubric is the indexed symptom — "Mind; fear; dark, of". Sub-rubrics qualify it by modality, time, or extension. Choosing the right level of the hierarchy is the central skill of repertory work.

Grades. Remedies inside a rubric carry a typographic grade — plain type, italic, and bold in Kent's original, extended to four or five levels in modern editions. The grade encodes the weight of evidence behind that remedy–symptom pairing: bold indicates strong, repeated support across provings and clinical records; plain type indicates a single or uncertain source. Repertorization software converts those grades into numeric scores.

What a repertory is not

A repertory is an index, not an oracle. Kent's own instruction was that the repertory narrows the field and the materia medica decides. Two boundaries define where the index ends.

First, the repertory does not diagnose. It maps the symptoms a practitioner has already selected; the case analysis happens before the book is opened. Second, the repertory inherits the limits of its sources. A rubric built on an 1840s proving carries that proving's vocabulary and its errors; the Complete Repertory and the Saine project both exist in part to audit and correct inherited listings.

A separate clinical layer sits outside the repertory's remit. Sudden severe abdominal pain with rigidity, thunderclap headache, focal neurological deficit, signs of anaphylaxis, suspected appendicitis, suspected meningitis, and severe dehydration in an infant are red-flag presentations needing prompt assessment — the repertory is not the right tool in that hour, and any prescriber working from one knows where the line falls.

From book to database: what software changed

Print repertories froze at their edition date and forced the practitioner to do arithmetic by hand — Kentian practitioners famously kept ruled analysis sheets for exactly this. Software changed four things.

• Search replaced memorised page geography. Keyword search arrived in the 1980s; semantic search, which retrieves rubrics by meaning rather than exact Kentian wording, arrived in the 2020s.
• Scoring became instant. Sum-of-grades, rubric counts, weighting, and elimination are computed live as rubrics are added.
• Editions became revisable. The Complete Repertory ships annual revisions; corrections no longer wait for a reprint.
• The case record merged with the index. Modern platforms attach repertorizations to patient cases, with notes, prescriptions, and follow-ups in one place.

Connectivity, subscription pricing, and data portability are the live trade-offs across today's online repertory market.

Which repertory should a practitioner start with?

Method decides, not marketing. A Kentian or classical prescriber works naturally in Kent, Synthesis, or Complete, because all three share the anatomical schema. A practitioner trained in the Boenninghausen method needs the Therapeutic Pocket Book or Boger's Synoptic Key, whose generalising structure the Kentian books deliberately avoid. Clinically oriented prescribers often prefer Murphy's alphabetical arrangement. Students can defer the purchase decision entirely: Kent, Boenninghausen, Boger, and Boericke are public domain, and several platforms bundle them at no cost — including the free tier at similia.io, which exposes the classic repertories with both keyword and semantic rubric search.

References

Hering, C. (1879–1891) The Guiding Symptoms of Our Materia Medica, 10 volumes, Philadelphia: American Homoeopathic Publishing Society.

von Boenninghausen, C. (1846) Therapeutic Pocket Book for Homoeopathic Physicians, English translation by C. J. Hempel, New York: Radde; first repertory lineage from Repertory of the Antipsoric Medicines (1832).

Kent, J. T. (1897) Repertory of the Homoeopathic Materia Medica, Lancaster: Examiner Printing House; sixth American edition 1957, New Delhi reprints ongoing.

Boger, C. M. (1915) A Synoptic Key of the Materia Medica, Parkersburg: self-published; repertory section and materia-medica section in one volume.

Schroyens, F. (ed.) (1987 onward) Synthesis: Repertorium Homeopathicum Syntheticum, London: Homeopathic Book Publishers; current electronic editions distributed with RadarOpus.

van Zandvoort, R. (ed.) (1994 onward) Complete Repertory, Leidschendam: Institute for Research in Homeopathic Information and Symptomatology; annually revised editions, current edition Complete Repertory 2026.

Murphy, R. (2024) MetaRepertory, Lotus Health Institute; lineage from Homeopathic Medical Repertory (1993, third edition 2005).

Saine, A. (2025) Saine Repertory, Materia Medica Pura Project.