MISS WILSON: There is not very much that can be said that hasnt already been touched on, excepting perhaps that every repertory system seems to have a definite set of principles underlying it. Kent has one set of principles underlying his; Boenninghausens, of course,is the totality of the case. It sometimes seems very hard to judge which is the most important and which is the least important symptom in a case. Therefore, if you follow Hahnemanns instructions and cover the totality of the case, you cant far wrong. It is a tedious system to work out. There isnt any question but that a thorough repertorization takes a great deal of time, but it isnt necessary for the physician to do that himself. Dr. Roberts has trained me to do his repertory work, and if he could train me, other physicians could have their help trained as well.
In Dr. Roberts office, although we use the Boenninghausen system as the main repertory, there are about forty there that are in active service. They are all in active service, I think excepting the Cypher Repertory that Dr. Farrington spoke of. It takes a whole post-graduate course to learn how to use the Cypher Repertory.
There are very many criticisms of Boenninghausens Pocket Book that are perfectly just. As far as Boenninghausen himself carried the work, it was very thoroughly and very carefully done. We might make a great many criticisms, perfectly just, of the Allen translation. What we have to do in using the Allen edition (which is the one that is most easily available at this time) is to know the mistakes and to work around them. We get good results in spite of them. Allens has suffered primarily from wrong translations. The translating has been very poorly done, or very carelessly done, or both, and the index in the back of the repertory is of no earthly use.
No repertory, of course, is fool-proof, because of several elements. One is the one who works the case, the one who uses the repertory; one, of course, is the taking of the case, and sometimes it is the patient himself.
DR. PULFORD: I have been attending meetings of this Association for many years, more or less ever since 1924, and I always have found that one of the best ways to get up a discussion was to get under the skin, so there was some method in my madness in writing the paper as I did. When the time comes to consider publishing the paper, I would publish the discussion and omit the paper.
I think in a way Dr. Underhill brought out the heart of the whole discussion in that it shows that we must know the limitations of our tools as well as their better points, and I think practically every one who has discussed the paper has merely emphasized that one point.
In answer to Dr. Farringtons question about the index, the purpose I had in mind chiefly with an index was to lead you to the information that you wanted, and the repertory alone doesnt serve quite that function. The whole function is to resynthesize from an analysis and not necessarily to lead you to all the minor points. I thought I brought that out about the matter of the index of an unconfirmed symptom. The unconfirmed symptom might be suggestive, but you wouldnt want to prescribe on that at any rate.