Chronic ailments are less thoroughly known, therefore, their natural groupings are not as well defined. Many of their manifestations move in cycles, and unless we await one complete revolution only a partial picture will be obtained, and the treatment will be correspondingly palliative or entirely nugatory. This is especially true of diseases like gout, malaria, etc.
Similar symptoms appear under many remedies; in our repertories these are indexed into paragraphs as colorless collections of drugs, only distinguishable by their relative values. It is only occasionally that the remedies which constitute such a rubric may, by their general character, be highly suggestive but nothing more.
To mechanically assemble the remedies which run though all or most of the rubrics having the closest resemblance to the symptoms of the patient is a method much is use, but one that tends to obliterate the finer shades of expressions on both sides, and after all, even with the aid of the mental symptoms, only approximates the choice. Much of Hahnemann’s greatness lay in his faculty of expressing every symptom and process in its natural language.
Standing over and above every bodily symptom are the actions of the mind, which, although variously expressed, reflect much that cannot be seen elsewhere. To be understood and properly used, mental expressions should generally be translated into their qualifying equivalents and only rarely reproduced in the exact words of the patient. The interdependence of mental and physical states is so great that we can never afford to overlook it entirely. They, moreover, always clarify every other symptom: often in a decisive way.
The manner and moods that patients display are of far greater value than any particular words that we may listen to. This we call personality; something quite apart. It is the objective help with which the mind surrounds itself; the true tincture of its action and is deserving of our closest scrutiny. The mind that hides itself in the subtleties of speech is far removed from the one that almost invariably uses direct and positive language.
It is not an unusual thing to find indications for the same remedy running through whole families. This is not a strange thing when we remember that the same mental as well as physical influences are apart to be at work there, and that the inheritances are very likely to be of a kind. In acute diseases the divergence is greater, but as we approach constitutional predispositions and miasmatic effects, the converge.
The symptoms which belong to the patient are the all important ones and far outrank those of the diseases. It should be the business of the prescriber to trace out the connection that exists between the two kinds, always keeping in mind their relative age and sequence; in no other way can we unravel what seems all a tangle at first sight.
Born in Western Pennsylvania, he graduated from the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and subsequently Hahnemann Medical College of Philadelphia. He moved to Parkersburg, W. Va., in 1888, practicing there, but also consulting worldwide. He gave lectures at the Pulte Medical College in Cincinnati and taught philosophy, materia medica, and repertory at the American Foundation for Homoeopathy Postgraduate School. Boger brought BÅ“nninghausen's Characteristics and Repertory into the English Language in 1905. His publications include :
Boenninghausen's Characteristics and Repertory
Boenninghausen's Antipsorics
Boger's Diphtheria, (The Homoeopathic Therapeutics of)
A Synoptic Key of the Materia Medica, 1915
General Analysis with Card Index, 1931
Samarskite-A Proving
The Times Which Characterize the Appearance and Aggravation of the Symptoms and their Remedies