What Is a Repertory? How Homeopaths Find the Right Remedy
The Problem the Repertory Solves
Imagine trying to find the right remedy for a patient by reading through hundreds of Materia Medica entries, one at a time, hoping to stumble across a matching picture. This would be impossibly slow and impractical in real practice. The repertory exists to flip this process around — instead of starting with a remedy and reading its symptoms, you start with the patient’s actual symptoms and work backward to a shortlist of remedies known to produce them.
What a Repertory Actually Is
A repertory is essentially an enormous, cross-referenced index of symptoms, where each symptom entry (called a “rubric”) lists every remedy known to be associated with it, often graded by the strength of that association. Rather than being organized by remedy (like a Materia Medica), a repertory is organized by symptom, body region, and modality — allowing a practitioner to look up a specific symptom, such as “headache, worse from motion,” and see a list of remedies associated with that exact presentation.
How Rubrics Are Organized
Most classical repertories, following the structure pioneered by James Tyler Kent, are organized in sections roughly following a head-to-toe layout, similar to a Materia Medica’s particular symptoms section, but from the opposite direction:
- Mind — emotional and mental symptoms
- Head, Eyes, Ears, Nose, Face, Mouth, Throat — symptoms by specific body region
- Stomach, Abdomen, Rectum — digestive symptoms
- Chest, Back, Extremities — further body regions
- Generalities — symptoms affecting the whole person, including modalities and general characteristics
Within each section, specific rubrics narrow the symptom further — for example, under “Head, Pain,” you might find sub-rubrics for “morning,” “worse from motion,” “better from pressure,” and so on, each listing the remedies associated with that precise combination.
Remedy Grading Within Rubrics
Repertories typically indicate the strength of a remedy’s association with a given rubric through typographical grading — often bold type for the most strongly and reliably associated remedies, italics for moderately associated ones, and plain type for more weakly or occasionally associated remedies. This grading helps a practitioner prioritize which remedies deserve the closest consideration when several appear under the same rubric.
The Most Influential Repertories
Kent’s Repertory, developed by James Tyler Kent in the late 1800s, remains one of the most widely used classical repertories, especially valued for its detailed treatment of mental and emotional symptoms.
Boericke’s Repertory, a more condensed companion to Boericke’s Materia Medica, offers a more accessible entry point for students and general practitioners.
Synthesis and other modern repertories have expanded and updated the classical rubrics with newer clinical data, and are commonly used in computerized repertorization software today.
Repertorization: The Practical Process
The process of using a repertory to narrow down remedy choices is called “repertorization.” A practitioner selects the most characteristic, reliable symptoms from a patient’s presentation (prioritizing unusual, striking, or “peculiar” symptoms over common ones — a principle covered further in Chapter 87), looks up each symptom’s rubric, and then looks for remedies appearing consistently across multiple relevant rubrics. The remedy (or small handful of remedies) that appears most consistently and strongly across the selected rubrics becomes the leading candidate, which is then cross-checked against its full Materia Medica picture before final selection.
Modern Repertorization Software
Today, most professional homeopaths use computerized repertorization software rather than manually flipping through print repertories, allowing symptoms to be entered digitally and cross-referenced instantly across thousands of rubrics and remedies — dramatically speeding up what was once a slow, manual process, while still relying on the same underlying classical repertory data.
Why This Matters for Beginners
As a home user working through this course, you won’t typically need to perform full repertorization for minor, everyday complaints — the remedy chapters throughout this course are designed to shortcut that process for common situations. But understanding how repertorization works gives you insight into how professional homeopaths approach more complex or chronic cases, and Chapter 89 will walk you through a simplified, beginner-friendly repertory exercise so you can experience the process firsthand.
- A repertory is a symptom-organized index that lists remedies associated with each specific symptom (rubric)
- Repertories are organized head-to-toe by body region, plus mind and generalities sections
- Kent’s and Boericke’s repertories are among the most influential classical texts
- Repertorization is the process of cross-referencing a patient’s key symptoms across rubrics to identify likely remedies
- Modern practitioners typically use computerized repertorization software built on classical repertory data
What’s Next
With both major reference tools now covered, the next chapter addresses a foundational distinction in how homeopathy approaches treatment differently depending on whether an illness is acute or chronic.
