Synthesis Repertory 8.1 - mid size

From the Book

Finally available as a book, this is the repertory that forms the core of the homeopathic software program RADAR. Now you don't have to use a computer to own this wealth of knowledge.

"Almost 200,000 true and repeatedly checked additions throughout all chapters from more than 300 sources including all reliable classical authors by priority. No useless repetition of identical rubrics."

"Thousands of corrections to Kent's Repertory with the source of each correction clearly indicated. Insufficiently clear symptoms have been completed on the basis of the Materia Medica."

"More than 1850 hard bound pages of scientific homeopathic knowledge. Size: 6 x 9 inches."

"German edition sold out in less than 6 months."

Being the only book that contains George Vithoulkas' official repertory additions, this is a volume that every modern homeopath should consider. Tens of thousands of symptoms have been rewritten following a clearly readable "symptom format".

Clinical rubrics have been renamed according to modern disease names. New clinical rubrics have been introduced. Distinctions between rubrics, subrubrics and remedies are neatly portrayed by the careful use of type styles, indentation and punctuation marks.

Every single addition is referenced not just to its author, but where possible, to the actual book it came from. Thousands of cross references and synonyms make it easy to find the right rubric.

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Details

Synthesis Homeopathic Repertorium, Version 8, edited by Frederik Schroyens, was published in 2001.

It is often stated by the homeopathic community that Synthesis is the standard against which all other repertories are compared. Synthesis is the repertory of choice in homeopathic schools around the world. It is used in more than 60 countries and is available in English, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, and Spanish.

Synthesis 8 is the first repertory to offer reliable information on more than 2,000 remedies, including new, little known remedies not found anywhere else. The new Synthesis 8 has added several hundred more remedies, with over 350,000 new Author references and 150,00 new Remedy references.

Synthesis 8 has set a new standard for completeness - for example, it includes over 100,000 references to Boger-Boenninghausen, all meticulously compared with the original texts to ensure their accuracy. It also contains 14,000+ Cross-references and 8,000+ Synonyms, making it easy to locate the correct rubric.

Being the only repertory that contains George Vithoulkas' official additions, this is a volume that every modern homeopath should consider.

Tens of thousands of symptoms have been rewritten following a clearly readable "symptom format". Clinical rubrics have been renamed according to modern disease names. New clinical rubrics have been introduced. Distinctions between rubrics, subrubrics and remedies are neatly portrayed by the careful use of type styles, indentation and punctuation marks.

Every single addition is referenced not just to its author, but where possible, to the actual book it came from. Thousands of cross-references and synonyms make it easy to find the right rubric.

This latest edition of Synthesis, further entrenches its reputation as the best repertory in the world. Even its appearance - the vermilion and gold cover, the typeface, the magnolia paper - is of uniformly high quality.

New for this edition is the production of the book in a miniature version. At 6x4 inches it is small enough to carry around in your pocket. A tiny magnifying glass is included to help read the necessarily small print.

All of the non-repertory information such as remedy and author abbreviations, an index of key words, and a lengthy explanation of the editing process behind Synthesis 8 is included in the companion volume entitled Blueprint for a New Synthesis.

The most important new feature of Synthesis 8 is the number of new additions, as Dr Schroyens tells us, "the amount of new information, compared to Synthesis 7, is almost equal to the information contained in the original Kent's Repertory!"

Much of this information is from new provings from reliable sources like Louis Klein, Jeremy Sherr and Nuala Eising.

Another important source is the collected material from Hahnemann, Hering and T. F. Allen and others-symptoms that were left out of Kent's original Repertory. Again, the inclusion of this information can only be to our collective benefit.

A third source is the clinical additions from modern homeopathic practice. Unique to Synthesis (and a fourth source of information) is the bracketing of hypothetical additions enabling the discerning homeopath's choice of what is, and is not, useable.

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Author

Frederik Schroyens, MD

(1953 -     )

Dr. Frederik Schroyens was born January 12, 1953 in Mechelen, Belgium. He is a 1977 medical graduate of the State University of Gent (Belgium) and a 1978 graduate of the one-year Homeopathic Training Course at the Faculty for Homeopathy in London (MFHom).

In 1981 Dr. Schroyens was the constitutive President of VSU, the largest Homeopathic School in Belgium. VSU has given a one-year introductory training on homeopathy to more than 1.000 students and fully trained over 150 homeopaths. The homeopathic education is build up over a five-year program. He also founded the Masi-workshops in Belgium and Holland.

Dr. Schroyens was one of the first RADAR users in 1986 and became enthusiastic about the increasing possibilities computer science offers to Homeopathy. Because of his dedication to the program, he became the Homeopathic Coordinator of the RADAR Project.

In 1987, he was appointed as the main link between George Vithoulkas and the programming team of the University of Namur (Belgium) during the development of the Vithoulkas Expert System. He has been accompanying George Vithoulkas on his seminars since 1988 as well as assisting him during most of his consultations since that time.

Dr. Schroyens published an introduction to homeopathy in 1984 in Dutch, which has been translated into French and Portuguese. In 1993 he edited a printed version of Synthesis, the expanded Repertory linked to the Radar project. A computer version of Synthesis exists in seven languages. This Repertory has also been printed in German, English, Dutch, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. Translations into various other languages are ongoing.

Since 1995, Dr. Schroyens has published several books based on Synthesis such as 1001 Small Remedies and Arzneimittelbilder von Gemüt und Traume.

Dr. Schroyens lectures on Radar and homeopathy in Europe as well as in North and South America.

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Reviews

From
THE HOMEOPATH
Reviewed by Nick Hewes

Despite the revolutionary possibilities of computer programmes such as Reference Works, which can scan roughly 200 years of materia medicas and homeopathic journals in a few seconds in order to find an exact word match, most homeopaths still love their dear old Repertory.

The reverence in which we hold the latter is sometimes unconsciously transmitted to our patients, who often ask fondly, "is that your Bible?" My first Repertory, Pierre Schmidt's version of Kent's Final General Repertory, really did look like a sacred text, dog-eared, gold embossed and Bible-black as it was. It all added to the impression that the Repertory really did somehow contain the Truth.

The latest edition of Synthesis, edited by Frederick Schroyens, carries on this venerable tradition of Repertory presented as Bible:- everything about its appearance - the vermilion and gold cover, the type-face, the magnolia paper - is of uniformly high quality. This book would grace a lectern in any chapel, cathedral, synagogue, temple or mosque in the world!

On buying my first version of Synthesis in 1994, the price did hurt, but within days I had realized that this was one of those rare products which justifies the ad-man's slogan: - "reassuringly expensive"; it is so opulent, so fastidiously produced, that simply turning its pages really does make one feel good; it's a bit like spending money you really can't afford on a nice pair of boots: - you may have had a terrible week, the phone hasn't rung, your patients have missed their appointments, things fall apart and the centre cannot hold, but don't worry, as soon as you put those expensive boots on, a voice says,"because... you're worth it!", and you start to feel better.

So it is when you lash out on your next edition of Synthesis.

The eighth edition has some new features that improve on the last version. One such innovation is the production of the book in a miniature version.

This is a carbon copy of the normal-sized volume, but at six by four inches it really is dinky enough to carry around in your pocket. Having used it for the last six weeks, experience confirms that it is, literally, very handy; its small size seems to mysteriously inspire one to leaf through its pages at every opportunity.

The only drawback is that its tiny print could possibly cause eyestrain if pored over for too long. For this reason, the book comes supplied with its own tiny magnifying glass, tucked surreptitiously inside the front cover of the book (these people really do think of everything); it is so small, yet so perfectly formed, it reminds one of the story of the elves and the shoemaker.

Another advance on previous editions is the abstraction of all information extraneous to the Repertory itself into a completely separate volume. This is, in effect, a companion guide, (although it goes under the cumbersome title of Blueprint for a New Repertory); it carries remedy and author abbreviations, an index of key words, and a lengthy explanation of the editing process behind Synthesis 8.

The creation of this separate volume is a very neat solution to the fact that the increasing size of the Repertory is starting to cause problems of unwieldiness.

This brings us to the most notable feature of Synthesis 8, which is the number of new additions, the quantity of which is truly staggering: - as Dr Schroyens himself tells us,

"the amount of new information, compared to Synthesis 7, is almost equal to the information contained in the original Kent's Repertory!"

Much of this vast influx of information is from new provings, and as such is essential material for those homeopaths who want to benefit from the creative transformation of our discipline over these last 15 years. The provings have come from reliable sources like Louis Klein, Nuala Eising and the assorted drones and clones of Jeremy Sherr's Dynamis School.

A second source of new information comes from a retrawling of materia medicas by classical authors like Hahnemann, Hering and TF Allen, many of whose symptoms were, surprisingly, left out of Kent's original Repertory. Again, the inclusion of this information can only be to our collective benefit.

Thirdly, there are a great many additions, which come from the clinical experience of working homeopaths. Synthesis 8 has added information from a staggering 655 sources (compare that to sixteen sources of new additions in Klunker and Barthel's first Synthetic Repertory).

Now a great many of these sources will be completely unknown to most of us, so we have no option but to put our trust in the judgment of Dr Schroyens' editorial team. In his defense, the great thing about Synthesis is that one can trace the source of any addition; this has always given it the edge over, for example, Murphy's Repertory, which, although more imaginative and intuitive in structure, has always suffered from the fact that its additions are unattributed.

The fact is, sources matter. As Rajan Sankaran says in The Spirit of Homeopathy, "The inclusions and gradations of Pierre Schmidt, you can bet your life on", but "Use great caution in the use of rubrics from Gallavardin".

Essentially Sankaran is pointing out that, as soon as you use additions to the Repertory, you have to start to use your discretion in how to grade the new information. For example, any addition from Vithoulkas (of which there are over 1600 in this update) is gold-plated; having worked in a holistic way with about 150,000 patients, if Vithoulkas tells you that Phosphorus has a craving for cheese, one simply nods politely in agreement.

But what if I tell you that I've had a few nice cures, using Bryonia in patients who have been ill since moving house? Does that mean we need to create a new rubric: "Ailments; moving, from house", and then to add Bryonia to it, with my initial after it? I'd have to say "Hang on a minute, I'm just a little man!" Meaning, adding new words to a Bible is a big responsibility.

The real problems, however, come with the fourth type of addition, which is comprised of theoretical, unconfirmed information. This really is a watershed in the evolution of Synthesis. Schroyens defends these inclusions, attributing them to the demands "of homeopaths requesting to have as much new information available as soon as possible".

It represents a sea change from the caution expressed in the introduction to Synthesis 7, where he wrote that if remedies are added "too quickly the expanded rubrics bring out differences in too many cases that ultimately lead to confusion. Hastily introduced information might be incorrect or irrelevant".

In Synthesis 8, however, the Editor appears to have literally thrown his former caution to the winds, by bowing to popular pressure to include hypothetical information; "it almost appeared that we had to create two Repertories" he writes, "one with carefully checked and entered information, and one with quickly entered, often hypothetical information".

His solution to this conflict of interests was to mix all the material together, and to denote the hypothetical additions by enclosing them within square brackets. These brackets seem to say: "Don't take my word for it guv, I'm just the Editor".

Schroyens justifies his inclusion of hypothetical remedies on the basis that, "it is the individual practitioner who decides which information to use or not". But is he not simply shunting responsibility for choosing new additions onto the working homeopath, rather than the editorial team, which is where that responsibility really belongs? The idea of adding unconfirmed remedies to this formerly great Repertory, and then leaving it up to the reader to decide whether to use them or not, represents a democratization of homeopathic knowledge, and may lead to a watering-down in our ideas of what a Repertory should be.

Any quaint ideas of the Repertory as Bible are lost. if you mix up the Apocrypha with the Bible, what you are left with is no longer a Bible.

In defense of these editorial changes, it should be mentioned that, in almost every case, the bracketed remedies come from the pen of Jan Scholten, whose ingenious ideas on the periodic table have propelled homeopathy into a wholly new orbit. It would have been much better, however, to have created a completely separate Repertory for Scholten's additions, rather than to have stigmatized them by enclosing the remedies within square brackets.

Nhoj Eel, in one of his excellent columns in this journal, once advertised the publication of his new Repertory, which now had so many additions that every rubric contained every remedy in the materia medica.

The serious message underlying Nhoj's wit was that the babbling clamour for ,'more additions, more corrections and more streamlining" (to quote the first sentence of Schroyens' foreword) would always tend toward the creation of bigger and bigger Repertories.

Ultimately however, a larger Repertory may make the practice of homeopathy more confusing, because it becomes more difficult to differentiate. When we got stuck on cases at college, we used to joke that maybe the patient needed Repertory 1 Om! - What we were really admitting was that we had lost our ability to differentiate the characteristic points of the case.

This state was often accompanied by a feeling that we were drowning in a sea of information. In homeopathy, more is not always better. To give an example of the potentially confusing effects of 'rubric overgrowth', take my last patient, who walked out of my door 15 minutes ago: because his life has been dominated by self-imposed financial constraints, I was confident that the rubric 'Avaricious' had to contain his remedy.

His main complaint is a malignant tumour, and there were three remedies in my mind: - Calcarea fluorica, Conium and Carbo animalis. Reaching excitedly for my Synthesis 8, 1 turned to the rubric 'Avarice', fully expecting to thereby eliminate one, if not two of the original trio of remedies.

Imagine my surprise to find that all three remedies are now in that rubric, two of them being additions. Even if these additions are justified, the end result is that I am now thoroughly confused, and will have to go away and think again about how to differentiate the remedy that is needed!

Synthesis has, over the last decade, brought a huge benefit to the lives of working homeopaths. I'm on my third edition, and I use this Repertory every working day of my life.

I've always felt pride and gratitude that our profession has been able to benefit from this wonderfully rigorous, reliable text. The Synthesis series has justifiably acquired a reputation for scrupulous editorial caution.

But Schroyens himself quotes the Latin dictum, "Verba volant, scripta manent" ("Words fly, writings remain"), meaning that once something is written down, it acquires a life of its own, and that therefore, one should proceed with great caution when enlarging a text like the Repertory.

If this caution is relaxed, it may be to the long term detriment of the Dr Schroyens' project, especially if it becomes an example of the Taoist saying: "Most great enterprises are ruined at the end".

It's important to remember that the word "babble" is derived from the name of the mythical city of Babel, which was ruined because people's desire for unrestrained growth led to a state of total confusion.

To return to the idea of 'Repertory as Bible', my preference would definitely be for the Repertory to aspire to the singular voice of truth, rather than to exchange its authority for the many voices of Babel.

The words "Bible" and "Babel" may sound almost identical, but in terms of their meaning, each one is at opposite ends of a spectrum.

The Homeopath
April 2002, Number 85
Reprinted with permission from the Society of Homeopaths

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