Book reviews

Materia medica of new homceopathic remedies. By O. A. Julian. Beaconsfield Publishers. s

Newcomers to homoeopathy sometimes ask whether any provings still go on today and whether new remedies have been investigated since Hahnemann's time. This book will go quite a long way to answer that question, for in it Dr Julian has summarized the provings and clinical indications of some 130 substances, most of which are new to the materia medica (for example, DNA, RNA, chloramphenicol, parathyroid hormone, thalamus, alloxan, hippuric acid), although there are also a few reprovings of more familiar remedies such as Latrodectus mactans, Cicuta virosa, and X-rays (using the original preparation dating from 1898).

Before going on to look at the way in which the material is presented, I should like to consider for a moment what kind of materia medica we actually need in 1979. It seems to me that one of the principal difficulties that the compiler of any such work must face is the question of the realiability of his sources. There is, in fact, nothing new about this; Hahnemann himself went to great lengths to make the reports of his provers as accurate and free from bias as he could, and subsequent researchers have done the same. However, the sophistication of clinical research has increased enormously since Hahnemann's time, and Hahnemann's methods would no longer be considered adequate today. His presentation, too, leaves something to be desired, as has often been pointed out, and subsequent compilers such as Hughes and Allen have tried to remedy the defects by giving all the circumstantial detail they could obtain about how the various recorded symptoms actually appeared. As Hughes pointed out, even the best and most comprehensive encyclopaedias of materia medica cannot be substitutes for the reports of the original provings, but works of the degree of comprehensiveness of Allen's great Encyclopaedia are the next best thing and are easier to refer to. Even Allen, however, has his faults, and indeed towards the end of his life Hughes became somewhat critical of this monumental work.

Unfortunately, the economic facts of modern publishing make it virtually certain that no new work on anything like the scale of Allen's massive tomes will ever appear again. The best we can reasonably hope for is relatively summary accounts like the present work by Julian. These are certainly better than nothing, but the fact has to be faced that they are very much second best. There is no way that the reader can assess the reliability of the quoted findings for himself; he has to accept the author's word for it, or else go back to the source material listed for each substance in the bibliography. It is safe to say that few readers will have the time, opportunity, or inclination to do this, especially when, as in this instance,

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many of the original reports appeared in languages other than English in foreign journals. However, there is one notable exception to this, so far as Julian's book is concerned: a number of the substances included are those proved in this country by Drs Templeton and Raeside, and the reports on these are to be found in earlier volumes of the Brit ish Homceopathic Journal.

These were in many respects good provings; some provers received placebo, and the results were presented in a fair degree of detail--but unfortunately not enough for the reader to be able to assess them properly. The case sheets were not reproduced, nor was there any indication of the temporal sequence in which the symptoms appeared. Hence, even if one goes back to the source material in the case of these relatively good provings, one does not find enough information to make a proper estimation of their reliability. One cannot tell how far the same would be true of the other authors whose reports form the basis of Julian's book, but one suspects it would be so of many.

All that the reader can do, therefore, is to form his or her own intuitive opinion of the relative likelihood that the various symptoms quoted would really have been due to the substance in question, rather than merely coincidental. In this task, unfortunately, the reader receives no real assistance from the author. He gives no indication as to which symptoms he thinks to be the most securely established; indeed, he does not even indicate which symptoms come from which source, so that it would be almost impossible to verify them from the quoted sources even if one wished to do so. These are serious criticisms, but it must be recognized that they apply to a greater or lesser extent to almost every materia medica published (certainly all modern ones), and the limitations of these reference works must always be kept in mind in using them.

The method of presentation is on the whole clear and logical. There is a summary of the pharmacological features of each remedy, which is usually brief, but in a few cases is more extensive. This is followed by the proving findings in the usual sequence by systems (except in a few cases where no provings have been carried out and only clinical information is available). Next, there are lists of principal symptoms, related remedies, and suggestions for clinical conditions for which the substance might be used therapeutically.

The translation is fairly good in general, although the clinical sections contain a fair crop of mystifying items. What for example, is meant by haemogenia, chronic haemorrhaging endothelial plasmatic conditon, inflammation of the coronary arteries, spasmodic coryza, and "chronic fibrous rheumatism, deforming, creeping, with enlarged lymphatic glands and spleen"? Less serious, but nonetheless irritating, are the frequent misspellings of medical terms (myatonia, arythmia). The general standard of production is good--as it should be in view of the price, which is high even by today's standards.

In spite of my criticisms of this book, the fact remains that it is the only place where one can find assembled the available information on the homoeopathic materia medica of these (for the most part) unfamiliar substances. Is this useful?

It could certainly be argued that we ought to be trying out new remedies on a larger scale than we do at present. For some reason homoeopaths, in this country at any rate, seem to be rather unadventurous in this respect. Few of the new

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remedies listed here are at all widely used in the United Kingdom; perhaps we have something to learn from our Continental colleagues? Even those remedies that were proved by Raeside and Templeton, such as Beryllium, Tellurium, and Venus mercenaria, have never made much headway. Why? Are we too conservative? Anyone who thinks we are should buy this book. In spite of its fa.ults, it will at least give him a starting point from which to begin his own clinical experiments.

ANTHONY CAMPBELL

La Symptomatologue Homoeopathique dans le Repertoire de Kent. Essay de Systematisation des symptomes generaux. By J. Baur. 140 pp., price and publisher not stated.

Dr Baur divides his subject into two parts. He devotes 73 pages to the mental symptoms, and has a chapter each on emotional symptoms, on activity, on greediness, on ethics and goodness, and on sociability. For example, under sadness he lists dejection, despondency, hopeless, hypochondriacal humour, melancholy, sorrowful. But he also lists numerous other rubrics which do not occur in the general rubric of sadness such as "everything is black and sombre, brooding, haunted by unpleasant subjects, complaining, consolation aggravates, angry when consoled, inconsolable". He finishes this section with the questionnaire by Dr Pierre Schmidt on mental symptoms.

The second part of the book is devoted to the general physical symptoms, and is split up into chapters on etiology, aggravations and ameliorations, general subjective symptoms, general objective symptoms and general pathological states, alimentary cravings and aversions, symptoms of sleep, and sexual symptoms, male and female. Again the section ends with a questionnaire devised after Pierre Schmidt.

There is no doubt that this book could be a great time-saver. As the English rubrics are quoted, a knowledge of French is not obligatory, though seeing the rubric in French as well is often illuminating. Fortunately the page references he quotes for each rubric are those of the 3rd revised edition, Chicago 1924, of Kent's Repertory.

I can recommend this book as a very useful supplement to Kent's Repertory. I can give details of Dr Baur's address to inquirers, but as he has not published it in this paperback I am respecting his reserve.

F.B.

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