Respected Sir,
What is the utility of very large rubrics, such as HEADACHE IN GENERAL in repertories? Anyway, smaller rubrics have to be pressed into service for individualising a case. If such large rubrics are not useful, why should they be retained in repertories?
Also what does the rubric HEADACHE IN GENERAL mean in terms of provers daybooks?

Hi homeoluv,

The larger rubrics are not useless. They have their own utility.

1. Repertories are nothing but a classification of symptoms. Unless and until you specify a base class, you can not create sub-classes. The larger rubrics contain the smaller rubrics withing their boundry and make it easy to locate the smaller rubrics due to this hierarchy. The base class will conatin all the sub-classes too. Larger rubrics are used to list all the medicines that have that symptom with varying sensations and modalities. So Headache in general will list all remedies that are known to have headache of any kind plus all medicines which have produced headache of non-specifc kind.

2. Larger rubrics are used to list the medicines which have produced a symptom which is non specific in nature. Suppose a prover develops a severe headache but is not able to descibe its character and their are no marked modalities. Where do we place such a symptom? In large general rubrics.

3. Large general rubrics can also help in individualisation For eg., rubrics like Side, Left are often used to filter the medicines.

4. When particular rubrics do not cover many medicines or when there is no medicine for a particluar rubric, a general rubric, which is large and covers more medicines can be used. This gives us an assurance that we are not leaving any useful remedy out of our analysis by picking only very small rubrics. The whole Boenninghausens repertory is based on this concept of generalization.

The provers day book will not contain information like headache in general. As I have mentioned above this rubric covers all the medicines which have headache of any kind, cause or modality or medicines which have headache where the kind, cause, and modalities are not specifc.

Best Wishes,
Dr. B