Bönninghausen and Boger
The second major innovation of Synthesis 9 is the addition of Bönninghausen and Boger to the Repertory information.
Much could be said to explain why this was done. Two reasons are paramount:
- Today's homeopathic community is increasingly aware of the value of these authors
- Kent included their information only very partially in his repertory
The gap between those two repertory worlds is now closing as both types of information have become available in Synthesis 9. Here is what we did.
A separate repertory was created for each of the six b-bg repertories. A team added the symptoms to an Excel file which was converted into an empty repertory (no remedies).
Other people then added the remedies to this empty repertory, and while doing so, checked the work of the previous people. Once a separate repertory was complete, it was printed in the same format as the original book, including the remedy abbreviations as used in the original book. Again different people checked this print out against the original book.
When a b-bg repertory had gone through the scrutiny of all these steps, remedy abbreviations were converted to comply with the Synthesis standards. For each repertory the original printed version has been used, either German or English.
At last, for b4 and b7, the additions and corrections as written down by Bönninghausen's son have been added with the author abbreviation b4a and b7a .
These original handwritten additions are preserved in the Library of the Pierre Schmidt Foundation, St. Gallen, Switzerland and graciously given to us by Hans-Jörg Hee for integration into our databases. This work is substantial as it counts more than 19.000 author references.
As a consequence a highly accurate and complete version of the repertory work of Bönninghausen and Boger is made available for the first time ever. These six repertories, or any single one of them, can be used next to Synthesis 9, and symptoms of different repertories can be added to the same repertorization.
But we went one challenging step further — we decided to integrate the b-bg repertory information into Synthesis.
This is a challenging decision because you may be aware that the type of information in both repertories (b-bg repertories and Synthesis) is based on a different concept.
The b-bg repertories offer predominantly generalized information (e.g.: "STOMACH - NOON"), which indicates that stomach symptoms of whatever type tend to occur at noon.
The corresponding remedies have been added to the new Synthesis rubric "STOMACH - NOON". They have been kept separate from any other more specific Synthesis rubrics, such as "STOMACH - PAIN - noon".
The same has been done for generalized b-bg symptoms expressing sides, times, modalities or localizations. Most chapters in Synthesis 9 have such symptoms which only contain generalized remedies as coming from the b-bg repertories. As a result, Synthesis 9 is easily recognized because the first rubric now is "MIND - DAYTIME".
On the other hand and most important: the existing, individualized and known rubrics, such as present in Synthesis 8, or even in Kent's repertory, were left as they were.
Nevertheless, some symptoms could not easily be integrated into the existing 38 Synthesis chapters: symptoms related to localizations that were larger than the existing chapter.
In order to resolve this, we have created three new chapters:
- Neck (this chapter contains symptoms related to the whole neck - the part joining the head to the body. It should be compared with the chapters "External throat" for the anterior part, and with "Back" (which contains the cervical region) for the posterior part.)
- Urinary organs (all urinary organs as a whole)
- Male and female sex/genitalia (if gender does not play a role, as this is often not specified in the b-bg repertories)
Synthesis 9, at least the software version, now counts 42 chapters, because of another additional chapter: a personal chapter. In this chapter you can add symptoms without respecting the structure of the repertory.
As a consequence, it will not be possible to exchange these additions with others, nor to add symptoms of someone else's "Personal symptoms" chapter to your Synthesis. Additions to this chapter are only useful as a temporary solution and the best place to add information to Synthesis remains the correct place within the existing chapters.
Synthesis 9 was ready to receive the information from the b-bg repertories. One more mammoth task was needed: to link the rubrics of the b-bg repertories to the correct Synthesis symptoms. This had to be done manually for each single b-bg rubric!
A special thanks to the people who have been taking care of this painstaking part of the job: Paul Debruyn (Belgium), Natasha Pelech (Canada), Dr. P. Sivaraman (India), Erik Van Woensel (Netherlands) and Peter Vint (Germany).
After the links were indicated, the remedies were copied from one b-bg repertory after the other into Synthesis by program. In this way the vast majority of Bönninghausen's and Boger's repertory work was integrated, adding more than 481,000 author references to Synthesis 9.
This figure corresponds to b2, b4, b7 and bg2. The smaller bg3 and bg11 will be integrated in a later version of Synthesis, but are available as separate repertories already now.
One further remark about this integration. In the separate repertories, the degrees were entered as in the original. The definition of degrees in the b-bg repertories is quite different from what we are used to in Kent and Synthesis.
Looking at the first screens of any of these repertories immediately shows that there are many more remedies in the third degree. Therefore these degrees were converted to the Synthesis standard following this table:
| b-bg degree | Synthesis degree |
| 1 | 1 |
| 2 | 1 |
| 3 | 2 |
| 4 | 3 |
This table corresponds to the way Kent has converted b-bg degrees into his repertory for the rubrics he did use. Maintaining the degrees definition of Kent and previous versions of Synthesis guarantees a stable continuation in our repertorization results, where the degree sometimes is a deciding factor.
The source information has been integrated into Synthesis with the greatest care. Together with the Materia Medica notes integrated in Synthesis, we now have about 488,000 notes with source information in Synthesis 9.
When printed, this source information alone would amount to 21,480 pages, using courier font 10. This is why we decided, not without any pride, to give this Synthesis the epithet of The Source Repertory.
