In short: Knerr's repertory, the Repertory of Hering's Guiding Symptoms of our Materia Medica compiled by Calvin B. Knerr, is free to search online in Similia, with AI semantic repertory search and nothing to download. It has 39 chapters, including a Stages of Life and Constitution chapter that Kent lacks, and 148,388 rubric rows with remedies in four grades. Because it indexes one book, each rubric leads back to a remedy's chapter in Hering, which you can read free.
Search Knerr's Repertory free, no download. Knerr is one of the eight classical repertories in Similia Free, with AI semantic repertory search: describe a symptom in plain English and the search finds Knerr's wording. In the repertory selector it is listed as "Hering". No credit card needed. Open Knerr's Repertory online →
Knerr is the repertory to open when you want a symptom in the wording of Hering's Guiding Symptoms, with the source line behind it. This guide is for qualified homeopaths and students, not self-treatment advice for the public.
Open Knerr's repertory online
Knerr's repertory runs in the browser, in the same repertory screen as Kent and the other classical repertories. To open it:
- Create a free account from the repertory page, where Knerr's repertory appears among the free classical repertories.
- Open Repertory in the app.
- Open the repertory selector and choose Hering.
The label is easy to miss, because Similia names Knerr's repertory after the book it indexes. In the selector the full title sits beneath it, and the info icon beside it shows the title with the compiler, Calvin B. Knerr, M.D. You can search Knerr on its own or keep it selected alongside Kent and the others; the guide to choosing repertories and sources shows the selector step by step.
Similia publishes no PDF of Knerr's repertory. You use it in the app, where a rubric can go straight into a case analysis.
How to use Knerr's repertory: one symptom, start to finish
Take a patient who will not answer when spoken to.
- Describe the symptom in plain words. AI semantic repertory search covers all eight classical repertories on Free, Knerr included, so you can type what the patient does and let the search find Knerr's wording. One clear symptom per search, with its location, sensation, modality or circumstance, works best (how to search symptoms in plain language). If you already know the chapter, browse it instead. If no semantic option appears, Manual work mode is on: choose AI-assisted under Work mode in Settings.
- Choose between sibling rubrics. The symptom belongs in Knerr's MIND - ANSWER branch, where the distinctions are fine. Among its sub-rubrics are averse to (5 remedies), refuses to (9), reluctantly (4), slow (6), short (3) and incorrectly (3). A patient who refuses to answer is not one who answers slowly, so pick the rubric that matches what you saw.
- Read the full path. A Knerr rubric's path runs CHAPTER - RUBRIC - sub-rubric, here MIND - ANSWER - refuses to. Elsewhere in Mind, many sub-rubrics put the key word first and the connecting word after a semicolon: MIND - ANXIETY - sleeplessness; with (11 remedies) reads as anxiety with sleeplessness, and MIND - ANGER - contradiction; from (6) as anger from contradiction. Read the parent branches before you use a rubric, because the last words alone can mislead.
- Weigh the grades. Each remedy is printed in one of four styles, from plain lowercase to bold underlined capitals. In Knerr, bold is the commonest grade, so it tells you less than you might expect; the grades section below explains why.
- Start a repertorisation. The green + on a rubric creates a case in your Quick cases folder, puts the rubric on clipboard A and opens the analysis, where you keep adding rubrics. On Free, this counts towards the monthly cap of 3 new cases and 3 analyses. The beginner's guide to repertorisation covers the rest of the procedure.
- Read each candidate in Hering. Check in the app which remedies the rubric lists and at which grade, then open each one's chapter in the free Guiding Symptoms library. Skip the opening notes on the remedy and its provings, which in some chapters include a long list of clinical authorities, and go to Mind [1]. In Hering's Hyoscyamus, for example, Mind [1] includes "Answers no questions ; cannot bear to be talked to." and "Makes irrelevant answers." A line like that, not the rubric's few words, tells you whether a remedy fits your patient.
How Knerr's repertory is built: chapters, levels and grades
The 39 chapters
The table lists the chapters in the order of the app's chapter menu. Each count is the number of rubric rows Similia stores for that chapter, its heading included.
| Chapter | Rubric rows |
|---|---|
| Mind | 7,729 |
| Vertigo | 1,311 |
| Head | 9,582 |
| Eyes | 6,279 |
| Vision | 1,397 |
| Ear | 1,496 |
| Hearing | 670 |
| Nose | 2,475 |
| Face | 5,960 |
| Teeth | 1,418 |
| Mouth | 4,128 |
| Throat | 3,990 |
| Stomach | 10,236 |
| Abdomen | 6,989 |
| Stool | 3,422 |
| Anus | 3,391 |
| Bladder | 1,728 |
| Kidneys | 370 |
| Ureters | 34 |
| Urethra | 477 |
| Urine | 1,695 |
| Genitalia Male | 2,694 |
| Prostate Gland | 90 |
| Genitalia Female | 8,121 |
| Larynx and Trachea | 2,381 |
| Respiration | 2,907 |
| Cough | 3,662 |
| Expectoration | 1,024 |
| Chest | 9,063 |
| Neck | 1,331 |
| Back | 3,546 |
| Extremities | 15,127 |
| Sleep | 3,665 |
| Chill | 1,997 |
| Fever | 2,738 |
| Perspiration | 1,647 |
| Skin | 4,141 |
| Stages of Life and Constitution | 1,204 |
| Generalities | 8,273 |
| Total | 148,388 |
If you learned Kent first, the list will look familiar. Against Kent's 37 chapters in the same data, Knerr has Neck where Kent has External Throat and Anus where Kent has Rectum, and it adds two chapters Kent does not have, Ureters and Stages of Life and Constitution. Our guide to Kent's Repertory gives Kent's list in full.
Extremities is the largest chapter, with 15,127 rows, or 10.2 per cent of the whole. Stomach (10,236), Head (9,582), Chest (9,063), Generalities (8,273), Genitalia Female (8,121) and Mind (7,729) follow. The smallest are Ureters (34), Prostate Gland (90) and Kidneys (370).
Rubrics and levels
Knerr's 148,388 rows are about 2.1 times Kent's 69,651, counted the same way, yet Knerr is shallower: its deepest rubric sits five levels down, chapter included, where Kent goes to eight. So Knerr is wide rather than deep. The MIND - ANSWER sub-rubrics in the lookup above show what that looks like: narrow variants of one symptom, side by side under a single heading.
Knerr's Mind chapter also keeps the illness a mental state came with. Under MIND - ANXIETY sit sub-rubrics such as pneumonia, cholera Asiatica and gastralgia; in (3 remedies each), cough with (8) and dyspnoea (9). Causes are filed the same way: MIND - ANGER - diarrhoea; causes (4), convulsions; causes (4) and cough; causes (6). When a mental state belongs to an acute illness, or a complaint followed a fit of anger, look for rubrics like these.
The four grades as Similia shows them
| Grade | How Similia shows the remedy | Entries in Knerr | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Plain lowercase | 87,841 | 34.4% |
| 2 | Italic, capital initial | 28,089 | 11.0% |
| 3 | Bold capitals | 120,142 | 47.0% |
| 4 | Bold underlined capitals | 19,306 | 7.6% |
| Total | 255,378 | 100% |
The colour of each grade follows your own grade-colour settings. Two things follow from the counts. First, grade 3 is the commonest grade in Knerr, so a bold remedy there is ordinary, not exceptional; judge its strength by reading the line in Hering. Hering graded every symptom in the Guiding Symptoms by reliability, and the author page explains his marks. Second, the 255,378 entries average fewer than two remedies per row, headings included, which fits the narrow sibling rubrics above. Filtering a rubric to a minimum or maximum grade is a Pro feature; on Free every grade is shown.
From a Knerr rubric to Hering's text
Knerr's repertory indexes one book, as its title says, so each rubric points into a remedy's chapter in Hering. Follow it there before you rely on it.
On Similia, every remedy's chapter in Hering is divided into the same numbered sections, from Mind [1] and Sensorium [2] through Sleep [37] and Fever [40] to Skin [46] and Relations [48]. The numbers stay fixed even where a remedy has nothing to record: Abrotanum's chapter skips eight sections, yet Skin is still [46] and Relations [48]. So a Knerr Mind rubric sends you to section [1] in every candidate's chapter.
Hering's section names are not always Knerr's chapter names. In Hering's Hyoscyamus chapter, for example:
| Symptom | Section in Hering's Hyoscyamus chapter |
|---|---|
| Vertigo | Sensorium [2] |
| Expectoration | Cough [27] |
| Dreams | Sleep [37] |
| Chill and heat | Fever [40] |
| Constitution and patients' ages | Stage of Life, Constitution [47] |
Knerr's Stages of Life and Constitution chapter corresponds to that last section, [47].
Knerr's relationship notes are one of five sources, with Clarke, Boericke, Phatak and Pitt, behind Similia's Relationships view, a Pro feature (guide to remedy relationships). The book itself is covered in our comparison of the classic materia medica books.
Read the Guiding Symptoms free → All 412 remedies are open to read.
Knerr beside Kent and the other classical repertories
Reach for Knerr when you want a fine-grained symptom and the Hering line behind it, or when you want to check a remedy you found in Kent against Hering's text.
| Kent | Knerr | |
|---|---|---|
| What it indexes | A general repertory | One book, Hering's Guiding Symptoms |
| Rubric rows in Similia's data | 69,651 | 148,388 |
| Chapters | 37 | 39 |
| Deepest level, chapter included | 8 | 5 |
Kent gives you the classical hierarchy, with deeper chains of sub-rubrics (Kent's Repertory guide). Boger's BBCR suits cases led by modalities and concomitants (the Boenninghausen–Boger method). The complete guide to the homeopathic repertory places all of them in the wider set.
Kent, Knerr and the BBCR are all on Similia Free, which includes eight classical repertories with AI semantic repertory search: Kent, Boericke, Boger's Boenninghausen repertory (BBCR), Knerr's repertory, Boger's Synoptic Key, the Sensations As If repertories by Ward and Roberts, and Boenninghausen's Therapeutic Pocket Book (TPB). Free also includes 21 classic materia medica books to read and basic case management capped at 3 new cases and 3 analyses per month. Materia medica search, premium repertories and the AI toolkit need paid access (Free and Pro compared). Our list of free homeopathic resources online covers what else costs nothing.
Plan, construction and history, briefly
For an exam answer:
- Compiler: Calvin B. Knerr, M.D.
- Source work: Hering's Guiding Symptoms of our Materia Medica; its volumes and dates are on the author page.
- Plan: 39 chapters, including Stages of Life and Constitution, which Kent lacks; 148,388 rubric rows, at most five levels deep.
- Grades: four, shown in Similia as plain lowercase, italic, bold capitals and bold underlined capitals.
- Strengths: fine-grained sibling rubrics, such as the ANSWER sub-rubrics above; one source behind every rubric, so each can be checked in Hering; Mind rubrics that keep the illness or cause of a mental state.
- Limits: a single source; a shallow hierarchy, five levels against Kent's eight; grade 3 covers 47 per cent of entries, so a bold remedy says less than it seems.
To put Knerr to work, open it free and pick Hering in the repertory selector.
