Synthesis vs Complete Repertory

Synthesis vs Complete Repertory is the choice that defines a modern homeopath's analytical desk. Both are "synthetic" repertories — large, source-coded indexes that grew from Kent's 1897 skeleton by absorbing material from the wider literature — and both dwarf Kent's original in size. They were built by different editors, on different editorial philosophies, and they make different trade-offs between breadth and verifiability.

The two lineages in one sentence each

Synthesis, edited by Frederik Schroyens from the late 1980s, is the repertory of the RadarOpus ecosystem: editorially curated, organised around clinical reliability, and revised across numbered editions (9.x and the Synthesis Treasure / Adonis extended editions). The Complete Repertory, edited by Roger van Zandvoort from 1987, is the repertory of the Complete Dynamics ecosystem: built on an explicit policy of including and source-coding as much of the literature as can be traced, with a transparent provenance for each addition. One optimises for a curated, trusted core; the other for documented comprehensiveness.

The comparison table

The dimensions that decide the choice are the three at the top — editorial philosophy, source transparency, and size — and they are not independent. The philosophies sit at two ends of one spectrum, so the rest follows from where a practitioner stands on a single question.

The core difference: curation versus comprehensiveness

The substantive difference between the two is not size — both are enormous — but what each editor does with a candidate addition. A synthetic repertory is built by adding rubrics and remedy-gradings drawn from authors beyond Kent: from Boger, from Boenninghausen, from clinical journals, from contemporary provings. Every such addition raises the same question: include it, and on whose authority?

Synthesis answers with curation. Schroyens's editorial program assesses additions for clinical reliability before they enter, and the apparatus distinguishes confirmed material from less-established additions. The promise to the user is that the repertory's contents have passed an editorial filter. The cost is that a curated repertory necessarily reflects the editor's judgement about what is reliable, and a practitioner who disagrees with that judgement inherits it.

The Complete Repertory answers with documented inclusion. Van Zandvoort's policy is to include material and to source-code it so the practitioner can see exactly which author and text an addition came from, and decide for themselves. The promise is comprehensiveness with an audit trail; nothing is silently filtered out. The cost is that the burden of judging reliability moves from the editor to the reader, which rewards an experienced practitioner and can overwhelm a beginner faced with a large rubric of mixed provenance.

This is a genuine trade-off, not a defect on either side. A practitioner who wants the repertory to have done the vetting prefers Synthesis; a practitioner who wants to do the vetting and distrusts silent filtering prefers Complete. Neither position is wrong, and the choice tends to track temperament as much as method.

How the two lineages diverged

Kent's 1897 skeleton contained around 647 pages and somewhere in the low hundreds of remedies in active use. The synthetic project that followed was not one editorial decision but a decentralised accumulation: Boger's Synoptic Key (1931) added Boenninghausen's modality logic; Phatak, Vermeulen, and others contributed clinical rubrics; computerisation from the 1980s made it practical to hold a single file that merged dozens of sources. Both Schroyens and van Zandvoort began their projects within months of each other in 1987 and faced the same raw material — the same provings, the same clinical journals, the same pre-digital Kent-Boger overlap.

What diverged was editorial policy, not source access. By the time Synthesis reached its 9.x editions and van Zandvoort had released Complete Repertory through successive dated editions, the two books had accumulated different mixes of the same underlying literature, weighted by different editorial judgements. A practitioner who understands that both repertories are interpretations of a shared corpus — not competing transcriptions of objective fact — is better placed to read divergences as editorial choices rather than errors. The Synthesis Repertory online page traces the Synthesis edition timeline; the Complete Repertory online page does the same for van Zandvoort's lineage.

Source-coding and why it matters

Both repertories source-code their additions, and for a serious user this is the feature that separates a synthetic repertory from a casual transcription. Source-coding records, for each remedy in each rubric, where the entry came from — which author added it and from what text. The practical value is twofold. First, it lets a practitioner filter an analysis to a trusted subset of authors, excluding additions they consider unreliable. Second, it makes the repertory citable: a rubric used in teaching or in a published case can name its provenance rather than asserting it on faith.

Software exposes this directly. A practitioner working in the Complete Repertory can restrict an analysis to, say, Kent-plus-Boger sources and exclude later clinical additions — recovering a more conservative, Kentian result from within the larger book. This filtering is one of the strongest arguments for a fully source-coded repertory over an uncoded one, whichever lineage a reader prefers.

The distinction also matters for educators. A teaching case built on a rubric whose provenance is opaque cannot be interrogated; a rubric with a named source can be traced back to the original text, queried, and challenged. Repertory pedagogy increasingly treats source-literacy as a core skill — knowing not just which rubric to select but whose clinical observation that rubric encodes. Both Synthesis and Complete make this possible; they differ in how granularly the chain of custody is exposed to the end user.

Practical reading: how to choose between them

The decision reduces to four questions a practitioner can answer about their own practice.

1. Which software ecosystem do you work in? Synthesis is native to RadarOpus; the Complete Repertory is native to Complete Dynamics and is also available in cloud form through Similia. For most practitioners the repertory choice and the software choice are made together, because the repertory is most fully featured inside its home platform.
2. Do you want the editor to vet, or to vet yourself? This is the curation-versus-comprehensiveness question above, and it is the real fork.
3. How much do you rely on source filtering? If you routinely restrict analyses to a chosen set of authors, a transparently source-coded repertory with strong filtering — and software that surfaces it — matters more than raw size.
4. What is your case mix? Both repertories handle the full range, but a practitioner doing heavily modality-led physical work may also want a Boenninghausen-style index alongside either synthetic repertory; the Boenninghausen method explains why, and Kent's Repertory structure explains the skeleton both editions share.

Neither repertory is more accurate in any absolute sense; accuracy in a repertory is downstream of the provings and clinical reports it indexes, and both draw on substantially overlapping source literature. The difference is editorial method, not factual superiority. A practitioner switching from one to the other will find most polychrest rubrics broadly congruent and will notice the divergence mainly at the margins — in rare remedies, in recently added clinical rubrics, and in how aggressively each book has incorporated contemporary provings.

Verdict

Choose the Complete Repertory if you want maximal, fully source-coded coverage and the freedom to filter provenance yourself, and run it in Complete Dynamics or in a cloud client that exposes its source filtering. Choose Synthesis if you want an editor-curated core and the RadarOpus toolchain. The two books answer the same question — what does the homeopathic literature say about this symptom? — by different editorial routes, and the right one is the one whose route matches how you already think at the desk.

References

Kent, J. T. (1897) Repertory of the Homoeopathic Materia Medica, Lancaster, PA; public-domain editions at https://archive.org/details/repertoryofhomoe00kent.

Schroyens, F. (ed.) (2009) Synthesis: Repertorium Homeopathicum Syntheticum, Homeopathic Book Publishers, London; editorial method described in the edition front matter and at https://www.radaropus.com.

van Zandvoort, R. (ed.) (2017) The Complete Repertory, Institute for Research in Homeopathic Information and Symptomatology; methodology described at https://www.completedynamics.com.

Boger, C. M. (1931) A Synoptic Key of the Materia Medica, Boericke & Tafel, Philadelphia.

Boenninghausen, C. von (1846) Therapeutic Pocket Book, Münster.