Our concern must be constantly to improve our Materia Medica by new provings; our Repertories by additions from provings and clinical findings. We can and should take advantage of present day mechanical aids devised for making information quickly available. During the past 18 months I have devoted much time to compiling a punch card repertory, using The Remington Rand Co.s machines for punching cards, then attaching the cards to a spindle as suggested by Dr. Joseph G. Weiss of Detroit.
There are two definite limitations to the method with the present machines which will only accommodate a standard size card that can use less than three hundred remedies and when over 150 cards are used it becomes difficult to line the cards up accurately.
By using only general symptoms of the mind and body, which are usually those that the patient describes as applying to the whole body or by use of a personal pronoun, and selecting from such symptoms those that are known to be associated with large numbers of drugs and by swinging each card out of the pack upon the spindle, it becomes easy to find the drugs common to all of the rubrics used. This list of common drugs makes up a compound rubric that is characteristic of the patient whom we are studying and of each drug on the list. Further differentiation from this list will follow the same pattern as in all repertorial run downs. Already men trying the method report a saving of time and an improvement in the standard of their results.
As an example let us assume that a patient has given us a record containing the following symptoms:.
1. Gen. aggr. from motion, first 49 drugs
2. Complaints and / or pains shift about 78 ”
3. Bruises easily 118 ”
4. Lachrymose 153 ”
5. Feels hurried, driven, not time enough.
to complete tasks 86 “.
As I repeat the list make a mental note of your selections. How may of the following remedies were included, how many did you leave out?.
The following nine drugs come through; Capsicum, Carbo veg., Causticum, Lachesis, Ledum p., Phosphorus, Plumbum, Pulsatilla and Thuja occ.
This is a good time to call attention to the incompleteness of our best repertories and therefore the therefore the great need for research constantly to improve them. Magnolia grandifolia has had a proving and shows markedly complaints and pains that shift about, but it is not found in Kent or other repertories that I have consulted, although Clarkes Dictionary of Homoeopathic Materia Medica gives what is known about it.
It is certain that only a punch card repertory can give you the compound synthetic rubric obtained above in so short a time. Once this synthetic rubric has been obtained, you can spend your time differentiating from the remedies uncovered with the assurance that each one is similar to the sufferings of your patient in all five ways.
In preparing the manuscript for these cards I was much concerned with the possibility that errors might creep in. These errors might be of two kinds; positive or errors of commission and negative or errors of omission. Great pains were taken to insure accuracy and I am certain there are few if any misplaced punches in the deck. With the first experimented deck I deliberately added some 70 errors, where they might be easily detected should they show up in a repertorial run down of a case. In hundreds of trials on patients records not one has ever been known to shows. There is a good mathematical reason for this as the law of averages makes it highly unlikely that any mistakenly punched card would influence the result when five or more cards are compared after being selected from the symptoms of the patient.
On the other hand the errors of omission, which stem from lack of enough knowledge about the 260 plus remedies listed on the cards are of great significance. Here the absence of a drug from any one of the rubrics presenting by the patient obstructs the proper inclusion of that drug in the compound rubric. This criticism is pertinent to all repertories and should drive us constantly to improve them.
It early developed that each rubric must be as inclusive as possible under our law of similarity (See Boenninghausen). To illustrate from personal experience, I have found that sensations of burning, cutting, tearing, stinging can be very difficult to separate from each other as they all seem to apply in a given pain. This very difficulty indicates a similarity, which is what we need under our broad generalization, so that if either rubric includes a drug, it should be in all.
The sources from which the information in these decks has been compiled are first Kents Repertory and Bogers additions to Kent, which were never added to the Repertory, but were published separately in The Homoeopathic Recorder in 1932 and consisted of some 130 pages. Also H.C. Allens Nosodes, and Fevers; Herings Condensed Materia Medica and Clarkes Dictionary of the Homoeopathic Materia Medica.
It is strange that repertory usage is still somewhat controversial in our ranks. It is heartening to find more papers, such as Engles recent report on Terebinth, and to note the increase of interest in the repertory as indicated by the titles of papers for presentation on this years program. To me a repertory is a valuable index and I could as well throw the index volume of my Encyclopaedia Britannica away as do without it.
The Punch Card Spindle Repertory offers portability and time saving to the sincere student of comparative therapeutics.
GERMAN TOWN, PENNSYLVANIA.
DISCUSSION.
DR. EDWARD. C. WHITMONT [New York, N.Y.]: Since last fall I have used one of those spindle repertories, and I should not like to be without it. You will find, when you try it, that some of the symptoms in it may not be to your liking, because you are used to repertorizing, and there are others you may miss. It was a matter of one or two hours work, which my secretary did, to put other symptoms in. I changed a number of symptoms, eliminating a few which I do not commonly use, and I carry that with my house call bag and have it at my hand in the office and rapidly one can cut down the average case to, lets say, five or six to ten remedies and start studying them, or do more detailed repertorial work on those.
DR. A.H. GRIMMER [Chicago, Ill.]: I should like to comment on Dr. Farleys magnificent paper. It is a plea for more scientific and more accurately homoeopathy, and that is what we really need, and there can be no question about the advantage of repertorial study and the need of it. Just to mention it, think of the enormous amount of symptoms that one of our well-proven remedies alone produces – Arsenicum – something over three thousand, and with all the remedies that we are working with – some of us are working with as many as a thousand remedies, partly proven, – no mind on earth can begin to take note of them and have any ability to use them without mechanical help.
That is good, but there is another phase of it that we must remember, and I add a note of warning from the philosophical side. We can get too mechanical. We can leave out the spirit of our remedy. Remember that the mental and emotional symptoms and symptoms of the will are the guiding ones, are the ones that express the being, the whole man. In taking our case we have to avoid the error of assuming some of the symptoms to be correct, and we must verify them in a number of different ways, so that each symptom that you take, if you have three or four good symptoms, you have more of a case than if you have pages of symptoms which are not reliable. So be sure that your symptoms are accurate, and be sure that you dont leave the spirit, the living, breathing image of your remedy, out of your case.
DR. CARL H. RUST [Berea, Ohio]: Well, I am glad of it, too. It is too much work, but I have been using these card repertories for probably forty or more years. I had to. I didnt know how to work out a case in the way the real men work them out, but I found that in the main in some chronic cases I could get the right drug in sometimes fifteen minutes, and that would be the cure for the case. I didnt do it every time. Sometimes you cant find the drug with the cards because you dont work them right, but in my experience of about fifty-eight years of medicine, I find that it is a great help to those of us who have to have help.
DR. RAYMOND E. SEIDEL [Philadelphia, Pa.]: I believe the first card system came out by Dr. Fields, of New York, in about 1909. I have had the pleasure of working with one of those card systems for twelve to thirteen years. They are so hard to get that the price of one of these systems now runs around 1000 dollars. When we see a set like this, that we can carry around in our bag, it is obvious that it is more helpful than the Field system, which is in a box three times the size of a portable typewriter case.
I have carried the case to Hahnemann to show the students how to pick our some usual symptoms. It is not perfect. It needs many additions. I believe Dr. William W. Young added to this system and used many others.
