The homeopathy study guide

Homeopathy splits into five strands — philosophy, materia medica, repertory, repertorization method, and supervised clinic — and the order matters. Study them out of sequence and each strand undermines the next: repertorizing before you know the repertory teaches search-dependence; memorising keynotes without the Organon turns prescribing into pattern-matching.

The sequence at a glance

Definitions for rubric, repertorization, and keynote sit in the glossary if you want them now.

The weekly structure

A part-time student holding a job can sustain this rhythm:

1. Two reading blocks — one Organon or philosophy session, one materia medica session covering a single remedy in depth.
2. One paper case — repertorize a published case on paper or in software, then compare your analysis against the recorded prescription. Published casebooks are self-grading: the answer is printed.
3. One review block — spaced recall of previously studied remedies. Recall, not re-reading: close the book and write the remedy picture, then check.
4. One differential exercise — take two remedies that share a keynote and write what separates them.

Stage gates matter more than calendar pace. Do not start stage 4 until stage 3's self-test passes; repertorizing before you know the repertory's structure trains search-dependence, which examiners detect quickly.

Tools for the paper-case loop

For the weekly paper case, run the analysis twice — once on paper, once in a free repertory tool — and study where the two analyses diverge. The divergence is itself the lesson: it shows which rubrics you reached for unprompted, which the software surfaces that you missed, and how rubric weight changes the totalisation.

Drilling each stage

Stage 1 is read slowly, not skimmed. Hahnemann's aphorisms are short on purpose; each one is a clinical instruction compressed into a sentence. §1–§70 cover the law of similars, the nature of disease, the action of the vital force, and the criteria for symptom selection. Read one aphorism, restate it in your own words on paper, then move on. Return to §153 — the criterion of striking, singular, uncommon, and peculiar symptoms — until it shapes how you read every case afterward.

Stage 2 is the first thirty remedies from Allen's Keynotes: Aconite, Belladonna, Bryonia, Pulsatilla, Nux vomica, Sulphur, Phosphorus, Arsenicum, Sepia, Lycopodium, Calcarea carbonica, Natrum muriaticum, and the rest of the core polychrests. Three keynotes per remedy is the minimum unprompted recall; the goal is to hear a patient describe a symptom and have a remedy name surface before you reach for the repertory.

Stage 3 is structural, not symptomatic. Open Kent at random pages until you can predict which chapter a rubric lives in and roughly where on the page. Mind, Vertigo, Head, Eye, Ear — the chapter order is anatomical and you learn it by use, not by memorisation drills.

Stage 4 is the paper case loop. Take a published case, write out the rubrics you select, repertorize them, compare your shortlist against the prescriber's. When you diverge, the question is never "was I wrong" — it is which rubric choice or which weighting produced the divergence. That is the trainable variable.

Stage 5 introduces differentials. Aconite and Belladonna both cover sudden high fever; the separation is in onset, the mental state, the thirst, the role of fright. Bryonia and Rhus tox both cover joint pain worse on first motion; the separation is whether continued motion relieves. Write these out from memory before checking the materia medica.

Stage 6 is supervised live work. There is no shortcut here and no book substitute — the gap between paper cases and a patient in front of you is the gap the supervisor exists to close.

Self-tests that show real progress

The strongest signal that a stage is genuinely complete is unprompted recall under time pressure, not recognition while reading. Specifically: at stage 2, you can name three keynotes for any of the thirty remedies without looking; at stage 3, you can find any named rubric in Kent in under thirty seconds; at stage 4, your shortlists on graded paper cases overlap the published prescription's top three remedies most of the time; at stage 5, you can separate close remedy pairs from keynotes alone without consulting differentials. None of these are subjective. Either you can do it on demand or you cannot, and the cannot is the next study block.

References

Hahnemann, S. (1842) Organon of Medicine, sixth edition, English translation, public-domain scan, https://archive.org/details/organon-of-medicine-6th-edition-completed-1842-german-edition-published-1921-eng.

Allen, H. C. (1899) Keynotes and Characteristics with Comparisons, public-domain scan, https://archive.org/details/keynotescharacte00alle.

Kent, J. T. (1897) Repertory of the Homoeopathic Materia Medica, public-domain scan, https://archive.org/details/kents-repertory_202403.

Kent, J. T. (1900) Lectures on Homoeopathic Philosophy, public-domain scan, https://archive.org/details/lecturesonhomoe00kentgoog.