Concordant Reference - Reduced price de Frans Vermeulen, Critique

Concordant Reference: Complete Classic Materia Medica

I want to have a copy of this book not only on my bookshelf, but also in my clinic, by my bed, in my bag to read on bus or train, and maybe even in the bathroom and certainly on my laptop as a stand-alone e-book. It is the best single volume materia medica I have ever seen.

My first materia medica was a Boericke Pocket Manual, 1927 edition, which looks so like a Bible or prayer book that people on the tube took me to be devout. I soon bought an ancient Clarke Dictionary in 3 volumes, and later a Margaret Tyler Drug Pictures when I started at college. Tyler quoted copiously from the classics, which I then bought and endeavoured to read in chronological order of publication. I soon found out which books were originals and which quoted each other – but I had acquired the habit of daily study of materia medica, which is still with me.

Frans Vermeulen started out with a Concordant in 1994, 1018 pages long and now it has grown to 2074. It is sturdily bound and on Bible paper and is probably about as big as it can get. All the remedy names and abbreviations are indexed at the start; pages are shaded to access the remedies in alphabetical order. The font is small but clear.

Ten sources are used plus Vermeulen’s own additions, comments and corrections: Boericke; Boger – both his own Synoptic and the Boennighausen; von Lippe’s Key Notes and Red Line Symptoms; TF Allen’s Primer; Alfred & Dayton Pulford’s Graphic Drug Pictures; Cowperthwaite’s Textbook; Kent’s Repertory and Lectures; Clarke; Hering’s Condensed and Guiding Symptoms; and finally TF Allen’s Encyclopedia. The distinction is well made between cured or clinical symptoms – as sourced from Hering; and proved symptoms from Allen. These distinctions and many more are carefully referenced in the text. This is what distinguishes Vermeulen’s work from rival modern materia medica, a regard for the transmission of carefully documented information.

Vermeulen has been fastidious and conscientious. What we have erroneously called small remedies, the little guys apparently entered as afterthoughts in Boericke, have been liberated. Inside every small remedy is a polychrest struggling to escape. These less well-known remedies have their own entry with much more information than before, with a retained identity of the source. Categories of symptoms like concomitants, alternating, extensions, better, worse are all signified with neat symbols. Relationship of remedies is derived from Clarke, even if considered complicated and vexatious. I shall not go on but there is a thorough 6-page introduction, which has not left me with any questions.

Samuel Johnson defined a lexicographer as ‘a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge’. Here is an example of most fruitful drudgery. The result is a pleasure to read and study. I have solved a few cases on the Homeopathic Helpline this week by leaving my copy close to the phone.