Concordant Materia Medica
HARDCOVER
By Frans Vermeulen
From the preface to the Millenium edition:This millenium edition of the Concordant embraces both an extension and a revision of the second English edition. Phatak's additions have been replaced by the original ones, mainly coming from the texts of Hering, Clarke, Kent and Pulford. Yet the general idea behind the Concordant has remained unchanged. What I wrote in 1994 as an introduction therefore still applies:"This book contains the maximum number of reliable Materia Medica facts in the mini- mum space," Boericke writes in the foreword of his celebrated Materia Medica.Given the number of good Materia Medicas available, I feel it is time that the maximum number of reliable symptoms was extended, without resulting in an extra metre of book space on every homoeopath's bookshelf.With this aim - the compilation of a complete but portable Materia Medica - I began by asking myself which authors I should include. The information and the sources they used would have to be reliable and should not be just a duplicate of the work of others. Experience shows that many Materia Medicas are almost identical, although there is no objection to this as long as they complement each other and provide nuances and com- plete symptoms.This is how I arrived at my plan to compare the writings of a large number of authors in order to gain a more complete symptom picture. Completeness is not a question of quantity, of more symptoms per remedy, but of quality, of a detailed examination of each symptom. Preferably, therefore, with a clear description of localization, sensation, modalities, pains extending and concomitant phenomena. Taken separately, not one of the authors satisfies this criterion, with the exception, of course, of Hering's ten-volume Materia Medica. If, however, one uses a single basic text - in this case Boericke - and then supplements it with the observations of other authors, thousands of pages of symp- toms can be reduced to a handy format, which is the aim of this book.After painstakingly comparing numerous Materia Medicas to discover which ones com- plement each other, I arrived at seven which met this requirement. By omitting repeti- tions, I was able, as it were, to paste the various descriptions together. Having gone through 3807 pages of text written by the seven authors below, as well as Clarke's Dictionary and Kent's Repertory, I was finally left with the repetition-free symptoms that are contained in the pages of this Concordant Materia Medica.