The Complete Repertory is the largest and most heavily sourced homeopathic repertory in everyday clinical use — a database that began as one homeopath's corrections to Kent and grew into a reference of well over 200,000 rubrics. For practitioners and students who already work with Kent or Murphy, understanding what the Complete Repertory is, where it came from, and how it differs from its neighbours is one of the most useful things you can do to sharpen your repertorisation. This guide is the dedicated companion to our broader Murphy vs Kent vs Complete Repertory comparison: here we look at the Complete Repertory on its own terms, and show how to put it to work in a modern online repertory.
What Is the Complete Repertory?
The Complete Repertory is a comprehensive repertory of the homeopathic materia medica compiled by Roger van Zandvoort, a Dutch homeopath and researcher. Like every repertory, it is an index of symptoms: it lists rubrics — symptom statements organised by chapter and region — and against each rubric records the remedies known to produce or cure that symptom, graded by the strength of the evidence.
What sets the Complete Repertory apart is its ambition. Where Kent's Repertory of the Homoeopathic Materia Medica holds roughly 68,000 rubrics, the Complete Repertory has been built up over decades to well over 200,000 — recent editions report more than 230,000 — with over 2,500 remedies represented and hundreds of thousands of individual additions to the base text. It was designed from an early stage to live as a database rather than as a single volume on a shelf, which is why most homeopaths today encounter it inside repertory software rather than as a printed book.
If you are new to repertories generally, it helps to read this alongside our beginner's guide to repertorisation, which explains how rubrics, grades and remedy lists fit together in the analysis of a case.
A Short History: From Kent's Margins to a Living Database
The Complete Repertory did not start as a grand publishing project. In the early 1980s, van Zandvoort began noting additions and corrections to Kent's Repertory for his own practice, with no initial intention of publishing them. The decisive step came later in the decade: he acquired a personal computer and repertory software, which allowed him to handle the growing body of additions systematically rather than as marginalia — and to compare his accumulated data against the existing repertory text in a way that pen-and-paper never permitted.
From those efforts grew the database that became the Complete Repertory. Van Zandvoort released the work in stages as each part was finished — the volume covering the Mind chapter appeared first, followed by further sections — and through the mid-1990s the database began to be used commercially within homeopathic software. The year 1996 is commonly cited as its first full release as a database, though, as with much of this history, exact dates vary between sources; what is well established is that the Complete Repertory was a creature of the 1990s digital era, not the 19th-century printed tradition that produced Kent.
A second strand of its history is collaborative. From around 1990, a team of roughly forty physicians from Germany, Austria and Switzerland — working under the guidance of Dr Künzli and, after his death in 1992, under Dario Spinedi with Hansjörg Hee — set about integrating the Boger-Boenninghausen material into the project. Over roughly six years, van Zandvoort received and merged their work into his repertory. This is part of why the Complete Repertory feels less like one author's notebook and more like an aggregation of the wider homeopathic literature: Hahnemann, Bönninghausen, Allen, Hering, Kent and thousands of later contributors all feed into it.
The Distinguishing Feature: Source Tracking
The single most important thing to understand about the Complete Repertory — the feature that explains its name and its reputation — is its commitment to documented sourcing.
Most older repertories present a remedy under a rubric without telling you where that entry came from. Was it confirmed by a full proving? Drawn from clinical experience? Carried over from an earlier repertory, perhaps with an error baked in? In Kent, you generally cannot tell. The Complete Repertory set out to answer exactly this question. Additions to the base Kent text are credited to their origin, and rubrics have, wherever possible, been traced back to the source that first recorded them.
This matters clinically. When you open a large rubric and find thirty remedies of varying grade, source tracking lets you distinguish an entry resting on multiple independent provings from one that hangs on a single clinical observation in an obscure 19th-century journal. For careful prescribers and for anyone doing academic or research work, that provenance is the difference between an entry you can lean on and one you treat with caution.
The verification process behind these additions was unusually thorough. Reports describe additions being checked against André Saine's extensive personal collection of homeopathic literature and against book reviews in old homeopathic journals, with van Zandvoort returning to original materia medica to resolve ambiguities. The cumulative result — frequently quoted as more than half a million confirmed additions — is why the work is described as among the most accurate, as well as the most comprehensive, repertories assembled.
Scale and Structure
How big is it?
Figures shift with each edition, because the Complete Repertory is revised continually — typically several times a year. Editions from recent years have reported well over 200,000 rubrics (some counts exceed 230,000) and more than 2,500 remedies, with a remedy-addition count running into the millions across all rubrics. In round terms it is roughly four times the size of Kent, and larger than most other repertories a practitioner is likely to meet.
How is it organised?
Structurally, the Complete Repertory keeps Kent's bones. It opens with Mind, runs through the regional chapters in a broadly head-to-foot order, and closes with Generalities, just as Kent does. If you already know your way around Kent's chapter logic — and our guide to Kent's repertory structure online walks through it in detail — you will navigate the Complete Repertory comfortably. The chapters are simply far more densely populated, with finer sub-rubrics and many more remedies under each heading.
Grading follows the familiar pattern of ascending degrees, marking how strongly each remedy is associated with a symptom. As with any large repertory, the abundance of sub-rubrics is both the strength and the challenge: you gain precision, but a casual search can return a forest of branches that needs disciplined reading.
How the Complete Repertory Differs from Kent, Murphy and Synthesis
It is easy to lump the big modern repertories together. They differ in instructive ways.
Versus Kent
Kent is the philosophical foundation; the Complete Repertory is its greatly expanded, continually maintained descendant. Kent's text is fixed — it has not changed since the author's death in 1916 — and its 19th-century language is part of its character. The Complete Repertory keeps Kent's framework but adds decades of later provings, clinical data and corrections, and, crucially, tells you where those additions came from. Where Kent offers time-tested stability, the Complete Repertory offers breadth and traceability.
Versus Murphy
Robin Murphy's Medical Repertory (the MetaRepertory) reorganises and modernises the material for clinical speed, grouping related rubrics and translating symptoms into contemporary language. The Complete Repertory takes a different path: it preserves Kent's classical structure and prioritises comprehensiveness and documented sourcing over reorganisation. Murphy tends to be faster to navigate in the consulting room for clinicians who think in modern terms; the Complete Repertory tends to be richer when you are hunting an unusual symptom or a rarely cited remedy and want to know how solid the entry is.
Versus Synthesis
This comparison is the subtlest, because the Complete Repertory and Frederik Schroyens' Synthesis are two of the great modern descendants of Kent, and both record source information. The difference is one of emphasis. Synthesis is known for tightly curated, source-checked additions, with a large editorial team and an explicit policy that nothing enters without verification — quality and reproducibility are the watchwords. The Complete Repertory leans towards comprehensiveness and frequent updating, casting a wider net and absorbing newer data quickly. Neither approach is "correct": one prizes editorial control, the other prizes coverage. Many experienced practitioners value being able to cross-check a doubtful rubric across both. (Synthesis is the in-house repertory of one particular commercial platform; the Complete Repertory itself is a reference work available across several, including Similia.)
How Practitioners Use the Complete Repertory Online Today
The Complete Repertory was born digital, and that is still how it is used. Working from a printed set of volumes is possible but impractical for a work that changes several times a year and runs to hundreds of thousands of rubrics. In practice, homeopaths use it through software — and this is where a modern online repertory earns its keep.
A typical workflow looks like this:
- Search a symptom once. Type the patient's symptom in plain language and let the search surface matching rubrics from the Complete Repertory — and, ideally, from Kent, Murphy and other repertories at the same time, so you can compare how each source phrases and grades the symptom.
- Read the rubric critically. Use the grading and, where available, the source information to weigh which remedies in the rubric deserve attention. The Complete Repertory's provenance is most valuable precisely here.
- Build a repertorisation grid. Add the rubrics that genuinely characterise the case, then let the software tally and rank candidate remedies across all your chosen rubrics.
- Confirm against the materia medica. A repertory narrows the field; it never decides for you. Take your shortlist to the materia medica to confirm the picture before you prescribe.
This is the essence of the compass-not-autopilot principle that should govern any digital tool: the software accelerates retrieval and cross-referencing, but the practitioner reads the rubrics, judges the sources, and chooses the remedy. The Complete Repertory's source tracking is an aid to that judgement, not a substitute for it.
Because the Complete Repertory's real advantage — breadth plus provenance — only pays off when you can search and compare quickly, it belongs inside a capable platform. Similia's online repertory lets you query the Complete Repertory alongside Kent, Murphy and other repertories from a single interface, carry rubrics straight into a repertorisation grid, and cross-reference candidate remedies with the materia medica without leaving the browser or maintaining a wall of printed volumes. For a fuller view of what that kind of platform does — multi-repertory search, grading, grids and analysis — see our overview of repertory software.
Who Is the Complete Repertory For?
The Complete Repertory rewards practitioners who want maximum coverage and are comfortable reading large rubrics with a critical eye. It is especially useful when:
- You are working with rare symptoms, unusual presentations or obscure remedies that thinner repertories simply do not list.
- You want to judge the reliability of an entry before you trust it — the source tracking is its signature strength.
- You are doing academic or research work that demands traceable provenance.
For day-one students, Kent remains the natural place to learn the logic of repertorisation; for fast clinical reorganisation, many reach for Murphy. But as your cases grow more varied, the Complete Repertory becomes the reference you turn to when you need the widest, best-documented net available. The most effective approach, as ever, is not to pledge allegiance to one repertory but to read the same symptom through several — and to let good software make that effortless.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Complete Repertory in homeopathy?
The Complete Repertory is a comprehensive homeopathic repertory compiled by the Dutch homeopath Roger van Zandvoort. It began in the early 1980s as additions and corrections to Kent's Repertory and was first released as a digital database in the mid-1990s. Built on Kent's framework and greatly expanded, recent editions hold well over 200,000 rubrics (counts of more than 230,000 are reported) and over 2,500 remedies, with hundreds of thousands of documented additions traced back to their original sources. Practitioners access it inside repertorisation software such as Similia rather than as a single printed book.
Who created the Complete Repertory and when?
It was created by Roger van Zandvoort, who began compiling additions to Kent's Repertory in the early 1980s and acquired a computer and repertory software in the late 1980s to handle the work systematically. He released it in stages as each part was finished, with the Mind volume appearing first, and the database entered commercial homeopathic software through the mid-1990s (the first full release is commonly cited as 1996). From around 1990, roughly forty physicians from Germany, Austria and Switzerland integrated the Boger-Boenninghausen material over about six years, working first under Künzli and, after his death in 1992, under Dario Spinedi with Hansjörg Hee.
How is the Complete Repertory different from Kent's Repertory?
Kent's Repertory, published from 1897, contains around 68,000 rubrics and has not been revised since Kent's death in 1916. The Complete Repertory uses Kent's chapter framework as its core but expands it roughly fourfold, adds material from many later sources, and is updated several times a year. Its defining feature is source tracking: additions to the base Kent text are documented with their origin, so you can judge whether an entry rests on multiple provings or a single clinical observation.
How does the Complete Repertory compare with Synthesis?
Both build on Kent and both record source information, but they reflect different priorities. The Complete Repertory emphasises comprehensiveness and frequent updating, making it one of the largest repertories available. Synthesis, edited by Frederik Schroyens, emphasises tightly curated, source-checked additions. Neither is objectively superior; the Complete Repertory casts the widest net, while Synthesis foregrounds editorial control. Many practitioners cross-check rubrics across both.
Can I use the Complete Repertory online?
Yes. The Complete Repertory was conceived as a digital work, so it is most practical inside repertorisation software. On Similia you can search the Complete Repertory alongside Kent, Murphy and other repertories from one interface, take a rubric into a repertorisation grid, and cross-reference candidate remedies with the materia medica, all in the browser with no heavy printed volumes to maintain.
