Homeopathic Clinical Pictures - part 1

Review

This book review is reprinted from Volume 22, Spring 2009 edition of Homoeopathic Links with permission from Homeopathic Links.

Reviewed by Kaare Troelsen, Denmark

At a time where, not the least in Links, quite a lot of effort has been put into the philosophy of constitutional prescription, emphasizing mental/emotional symptoms, it is great to see new books concerned with modalities, clinical observation and physical signs. This rock-solid knowledge forms the basis of homeopathy and constituted some of the first observations Hahnemann made when he was investigating his remedies and patients. Homeopathic clinical observations are critical to individualisation.

In the foreword van der Zee writes that he laughed out loud when he first picked up the German version and that learning should be fun. And with this book it really is entertaining to look at the illustrations by Julia Drinnenberg accompanied by Alexander Gothe's text. You find yourself leafing through the book looking with anticipation at how they managed to illustrate this or that remedy or symptom and either laughing at the imaginative ways the text and pictures work together or laughing and cringing at the graphic ways the dysfunction's of bodily processes are illustrated. This is certainly much more fun and more memorable than dry lists of keynotes and modalities. We are always talking about remedy pictures and symptom totalities so its obvious that the use of drawings is an important tool to teach Materia Medica. These images certainly stick in your mind.

The book is arranged into 29 therapeutic chapters dealing mainly with acute conditions and a few chronic physical conditions like sleep disorder and headache too. Each chapter starts with a short introduction describing the cause, nature and pathology of the condition often including osteopathic background knowledge to also give other perspectives of the disease. In the introduction the most common remedies for the condition are listed and are followed by a resume of other possible remedies. The one-page illustrations of each important remedy for a condition are really enjoyable.

Like the funny, dutiful, overexerted Calcarea carbonica Santa Claus who is late and overwhelmed and woo gets muscle cramps on stretching his legs, or the Magnesia phosphorica carpenter with muscle cramps in his hands which are _meliorated by the heat and pressure of his wife's big behind.

The many illustrations of the various Mercuries unsurprisingly take your appetite away with their striking graphic representation of pus, discharge, horrible smell and inflammation in various orifices. This is certainly an efficient way of anchoring information in the mind of the student.

Some of the pictures, such as the one of the Petroselinum sativum man who is sticking a bottle cleaner up his urethra due to itching, are painful to look at; and the chapter on bone fractures or burns is toe-curling. But you say "ouch!" and therefore you will remember that symptom, which is the purpose of the book. It is a book which is useful to students who are learning the remedies and how to observe patients but also a good quick reference book for the practitioner when differentiating remedies in the clinic. The introduction makes several important points about the relationship between acute and chronic disease, Paul Herscu is quoted as saying that "the hasty prescription of an acute remedy without first matching it against the constitutional features of the patient constitutes one of the major and most frequent mistakes in therapeutic practice". Maybe the next book in the series could illustrate that relationship? Reading this book certainly made me thirsty for more of the same and made me want to get "Homeopathic Remedy Pictures", the first book in the series as well.