In short: Repertorisation (American spelling repertorization; German Repertorisation, French répertorisation) is the step in homeopathic case analysis in which the patient's characteristic symptoms are looked up as rubrics in a repertory and the remedies listed under them are combined and ranked, so that a short list can be checked against the materia medica before a prescription. It is a ranking method, not a diagnosis and not a prescription. The repertory is the book; repertorisation is what a practitioner does with it. The ranking proposes candidates, and the materia medica and the practitioner's judgement decide between them.
This is education for qualified homeopaths and serious students, not self-treatment advice for the public. The page covers the meaning of the term, the history of the method and the logic behind it, including the distinction between the repertory and repertorisation that German and English searchers most often blur. The procedure itself, in six steps, lives in the beginner's guide to repertorisation; read this page before it, or instead of it if what you need is the concept rather than the drill.
What the word means, and what it does not
The noun descends from the Latin repertorium, an inventory or finding-list, formed from reperire, to find. A repertory is therefore a finding-list of symptoms, and to repertorise a symptom is to look it up in that list. The noun repertorisation names the whole procedure rather than a single look-up: deciding which symptoms deserve to be looked up, finding the rubric that expresses each one, combining the remedies recorded across those rubrics, and reading the ranking that results.
Similia's glossary compresses it into two sentences: "The process of selecting the characteristic symptoms of a case, finding the rubric for each in the repertory, and combining the remedies and grades across those rubrics to rank the candidates. The ranking is then checked against the materia medica before prescribing." Every clause in that definition is a decision the practitioner makes, not the book.
Three things repertorisation is not, because each is routinely confused with it:
- It is not the repertory. The repertory is the reference work; repertorisation is the method of using it. The next section separates the two, since the confusion is the most common one in both languages.
- It is not case-taking. Case-taking comes first and produces the record from which the characteristic symptoms are chosen. A repertorisation is only as good as the record it is computed from; no arithmetic repairs a case that was taken badly.
- It is not the prescription. The ranking has no authority of its own. It ends in a shortlist, and the prescription follows only after the shortlisted remedies have been read as whole pictures in the materia medica.
On spelling: British and Australian texts write repertorisation, American texts repertorization, and both appear in the same syllabi and the same software, so treat them as one word. German uses Repertorisation and the verb repertorisieren; French uses répertorisation. Kent's own title uses neither, because his book is a Repertory, and that distinction is the subject of the next section.
Repertory vs repertorisation: the book and the method
A repertory is an index of symptoms, called rubrics, each listing the remedies that the homeopathic literature associates with that symptom, together with a grade for each remedy. The materia medica is organised by remedy; the repertory inverts it and is organised by symptom, so that a practitioner who starts from a patient rather than from a remedy has somewhere to begin. The complete guide to the homeopathic repertory sets the major works side by side; here only two mechanics matter.
A rubric is one entry: a symptom in the source's own wording, such as "Mind; Fear; thunderstorm, of", followed by the remedies recorded under it. Rubrics nest, so "Head; Pain; forehead; morning" narrows "Head; Pain" step by step. A grade is the weight the compiler gave each remedy within a rubric. Kent's typography encodes it as bold for remedies repeatedly confirmed, italic for well established and plain type for merely recorded; several modern repertories add a fourth grade, and Boger's revision of Boenninghausen uses five.
Repertorisation is what you do with those entries: choose several rubrics that express the characteristic symptoms of the case, combine the remedies across them, let the grades act as weights, and read the ranking. The repertory is static; repertorisation is a sequence of judgements applied to it.
Two questions German readers ask belong here. Was heißt Repertorium? It is simply the German word for the book, from the same Latin root, and it names the reference work rather than the method. Was ist das Repertorium der homöopathischen Arzneimittel? It is the German title of James Tyler Kent's Repertory of the Homoeopathic Materia Medica, first published in 1897, which Kent's biography on Similia describes as expanding the earlier repertories of Lippe and Boenninghausen into 37 chapters ordered from Mind to Generals with three grades of remedy. The guide to Kent's structure walks through those chapters; for this page, Kent's book is the most-used Repertorium, and repertorisation is the act of using it.
A short history: from Hahnemann's symptom lists to software
Repertorisation exists because the proving record outgrew memory; every stage of its history answers that one problem.
Hahnemann. Between 1811 and 1821 Samuel Hahnemann issued the Materia Medica Pura in six volumes of proving symptoms, and in 1828 The Chronic Diseases added the antipsoric remedies. Hahnemann kept a personal symptom register in manuscript but left no general repertory of his own; the first repertories in general use came from his followers. What he did supply was the rule that decides what is worth looking up: §153 of the Organon, which the Organon guide calls the most-cited aphorism in the book, holds that in comparing remedy with case the striking, singular, uncommon and peculiar signs decide. Common symptoms fill rubrics; characteristic symptoms choose remedies. The Materia Medica Pura itself is among the 21 classic books you can read online free on Similia.
Boenninghausen. Clemens von Boenninghausen (1785–1864), a Dutch-born lawyer who settled in Münster and turned to homeopathy, and one of Hahnemann's closest collaborators, printed some of the earliest repertories at Münster in the 1830s; the English Wikipedia entry lists his two-volume Systematisch-alphabetisches Repertorium der homöopathischen Arzneien under 1833–1835 (source: en.wikipedia.org, 20 September 2026). His Therapeutic Pocket Book of 1846 introduced the idea the method still turns on: a symptom can be split into location, sensation, modality and concomitant, and those parts can be recombined to find remedies for a combination that was never proved as a whole. Boenninghausen's preface to it says the earlier Repertory had circulated for more than fifteen years and been adopted by Jahr, and describes five classes of remedy distinguished by typeface: four principal grades, capitals down to roman type, and a fifth, in parentheses, for remedies still in doubt.
Lippe and Kent. Adolph Lippe (1812–1888), a German-born Philadelphia professor of materia medica, made the characteristic symptom the centre of prescribing in his Key Notes and Red Line Symptoms; the Lippe repertory that Kent's work grew from is Constantine Lippe's Repertory to the More Characteristic Symptoms of the Materia Medica (New York, 1879; catalogue records at archive.org, 20 September 2026). Kent built on that book and on Boenninghausen, whose Pocket Book his 1897 preface names among the special repertories his general work was meant to connect, and his Repertory of the Homoeopathic Materia Medica (1897) gave the profession its standard shape: 37 chapters from Mind to Generals, three grades. His Lectures on Homoeopathic Philosophy (1900) set out the method that ranks the mental and general symptoms above the particulars, which is where the hierarchy most schools still teach enters repertorisation.
Boger and Boericke. Cyrus Maxwell Boger studied Boenninghausen's German writings and in 1905 published Boenninghausen's Characteristics and Repertory, the BBCR, which reorganised and expanded the earlier work for the method of complete symptoms and generalised modalities. His Synoptic Key of the Materia Medica (1915) condensed each remedy into its modalities, generals and regional symptoms, and his General Analysis and Card Repertory extended the same method. In a different branch, Oscar E. Boericke's Clinical Repertory, bound into the ninth edition of his brother's Pocket Manual (1927), indexed remedies under clinical headings rather than symptoms.
The modern editors. Robin Murphy's Homeopathic Medical Repertory (1993), now Murphy's MetaRepertory, reorganised the rubrics alphabetically for speed at the desk. Roger van Zandvoort began around 1982, as a student, to compile additions and corrections to Kent's Repertory; the project became the Complete Repertory, first published in book form in 1996. Frederik Schroyens' Synthesis took Kent as its skeleton and added source-tagged material through numbered print editions, of which 9.1 is the classic reference; its current line, Adonis, is digital-only, exclusive to its own commercial platform and not licensed to other software.
Software. Van Zandvoort acquired a computer and repertory software in the late 1980s to handle the Complete Repertory systematically, and from that decade Computer-Repertorisation replaced the pencil grid: rubrics selected on screen, totals computed instantly, cross-references followed by a click. Browser-based tools later removed the installation, and semantic repertory search took on the translation from a patient's modern words to the repertory's classical phrasing, the steepest part of learning the method.
| Year | Work | What it added to repertorisation |
|---|---|---|
| 1811–1821 | Hahnemann, Materia Medica Pura | The proving record that made an index necessary |
| 1833–1835 | Boenninghausen, Systematisch-alphabetisches Repertorium | The earliest repertories in general use |
| 1846 | Boenninghausen, Therapeutic Pocket Book | The complete symptom split into four parts; five typographic classes |
| 1897 | Kent, Repertory of the Homoeopathic Materia Medica | 37 chapters from Mind to Generals; three grades; the hierarchy |
| 1905 | Boger, Boenninghausen's Characteristics and Repertory | The Boenninghausen method in a standard English repertory; five degrees |
| 1927 | Oscar Boericke, Clinical Repertory | The clinical-index branch |
| 1993 | Murphy, Homeopathic Medical Repertory | Alphabetical organisation |
| 1996 | Van Zandvoort, Complete Repertory (book form) | Source-referenced additions to Kent |
| Late 1980s onward | Repertory software | Instant totals, cross-repertory search, semantic repertory search |
How the method works, in principle
This is the logic, not the tutorial. Five ideas carry it.
Characteristic symptoms decide what is looked up. A symptom that belongs to the diagnosis rather than to the patient, such as cough in bronchitis, is shared by hundreds of remedies and separates nothing. The symptoms worth a rubric are the ones §153 points at: the striking, uncommon and peculiar features, the clear modalities, the well-marked mental state and the generals that describe the whole person.
The rubric is the repertory's wording, not the patient's. A patient says the head feels as if in a vice; the repertory says "Head; Pain; pressing" or "constricting". The translation from one language to the other, at the right level of generality, is the skill that separates a good repertorisation from a bad one. Too broad a rubric drowns the analysis in polychrests; too narrow a rubric rests the case on one fragile entry.
The arithmetic counts two things that do not always agree. For each remedy the analysis records how many of the chosen rubrics it appears in, and the sum of its grades across them. The two orderings can differ, and the difference is informative rather than a fault:
| Remedy | Rubric 1 (mental) | Rubric 2 (general) | Rubric 3 (modality) | Rubric 4 (particular) | Rubrics covered | Sum of grades |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Remedy A | 3 | 3 | – | 3 | 3 | 9 |
| Remedy B | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 4 | 8 |
| Remedy C | 3 | – | 1 | – | 2 | 4 |
The table is schematic, not a real case. Remedy A leads on grade sum; Remedy B leads on coverage. If Rubric 3 is the peculiar modality the case turns on, A does not cover it at all, and the grade total has just misled you. Reading a grid means reading which remedy covers which rubric, not the last column.
Eliminating rubrics and the schools. Many methods let one or two rubrics act as filters, the eliminating rubrics: a remedy absent from such a rubric is dropped whatever its total elsewhere. Which rubric may play that role is where the schools differ, and the Boenninghausen–Boger method guide has the detail.
| School | Unit of analysis | What carries the weight | Reference work |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kentian | The rubric as given, ranked by the hierarchy mentals, generals, particulars | Mental and general symptoms filter first; particulars narrow | Kent's Repertory (1897) |
| Boenninghausen | The complete symptom split into location, sensation, modality and concomitant | Modalities and concomitants, generalised to the whole patient | Therapeutic Pocket Book (1846) |
| Boger | The complete symptom plus pathological generals | Modalities, concomitants and pathological generals, re-graded | BBCR (1905), Synoptic Key (1915) |
The ranking proposes; the materia medica disposes. The top of the grid is a shortlist of two to four remedies. Each is then read as a whole picture, and the one that matches the patient as a person, not merely the rubrics, is the one prescribed, even when it did not score highest. The materia medica versus repertory guide explains why neither book can do the other's job. The beginner's guide linked at the top turns these five ideas into six steps.
Manual and computer repertorisation: what changed, what did not
What changed is retrieval. A printed repertorisation meant one book at a time, a pencil grid and a page turned for every cross-reference. Software searches several repertories at once, so that Kent's, Boger's and Boericke's wording of the same symptom can be compared in one query; it recomputes coverage and grade totals as rubrics are added or removed; it follows a cross-reference by a click; and semantic repertory search maps a patient's phrasing to the classical rubric wording, always the steepest part of learning the method. On Similia, semantic repertory search across the seven classical repertories is part of the free plan.
What did not change is everything that decides whether the result is any good: which symptoms are characteristic, which rubric expresses each one, how the hierarchy is applied, and the reading in the materia medica that follows. Software makes a bad rubric choice faster, not better. A grid computed in a second on the wrong rubrics is as wrong as one that took an hour, and it looks more authoritative.
One note for readers working in German: the classical repertories on Similia are English-language works. A German translation of the Complete Repertory exists as a one-time paid add-on that requires an active Complete subscription; it is not part of the free plan.
Where repertorisations go wrong
The beginner's guide covers the workflow mistakes. These are the errors of logic, the ones that survive experience:
- Reading the grade sum as a verdict. The total summarises the rubrics you chose, weighted by a compiler's confidence. It says nothing about the rubrics you did not choose, and it cannot tell a peculiar symptom from a common one.
- Repertorising the diagnosis. Rubrics for the common symptoms of a named condition pull every polychrest to the top and flatten the individuality of the case. They belong in the analysis, if at all, as confirmation, never as the rubrics that drive it.
- A rubric from the wrong language or the wrong era. Each repertory has its own vocabulary and its own sources; a rubric chosen because its wording looks similar, or a rubric from a repertory whose grades mean something different, imports an error the arithmetic cannot detect.
- Ignoring cross-references and sub-rubrics. The symptom often sits one level down, or under a related heading, and the remedies there are not the remedies in the parent rubric. A repertorisation built on parent rubrics alone is a repertorisation of generalities.
- Skipping the materia medica. The most expensive error and the most common. The grid ends in a shortlist; a prescription made from it without reading the remedies is a prescription made by the compiler, not the practitioner.
Repertorising on Similia
Similia's free plan includes seven classical repertories: Kent, Boericke, Boger's Boenninghausen (BBCR), Knerr's repertory of Hering's Guiding Symptoms, Boger's Synoptic Key, and the Sensations As If repertories by Ward and Roberts, with AI semantic repertory search across them and an analysis grid that scores remedies by the number and grade of matching rubrics. Basic case management is capped at three new cases and three analyses a month, and 21 classic materia medica books are there to read online. Pro adds the premium repertories (Murphy's MetaRepertory, the Complete Repertory and the Saine Repertory), unlimited cases and analyses, and the AI toolkit (Notes-to-Rubric, AI case analysis, live audio transcription and photo analysis), whose operations use credits.
If you want to feel the mechanics rather than read about them, open the free online repertory, type a symptom in plain language and add the verified rubric to an analysis; the free guide to searching symptoms in plain language shows each step. What appears is the repertorial totality made visible; what you do with it is still the method this page describes.
