‘I have been accused of being conscientious about trifles ...’
Parts of a 1994 interview with Roger van Zandvoort by Greg Bedayn (for the American Homeopath) about the Complete Repertory version 3.0, describing how the whole project started.
For all homeopaths, choosing a repertory takes much consideration; sometimes it takes years for a practitioner to find the repertory that works best for him or her. The most important requirement in choosing a repertory is the reliability of the information found within it. Many repertories have been published in the past 150 years, some more useful than others, and some more accurate than others. Roger van Zandvoort, of the Netherlands, is long recognized by many to be a relentless researcher in compiling his greatly expanded work, the Complete Repertory. Roger has gone to great ends to make his repertory as reliable and thorough as possible, with many thousands of additional and previously uncorrected rubrics and remedies. His methods and reputation for assimiliating accurate homeopathic information are among the highest in the history of homeopathic repertorial research. – Greg Bedayn –
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American Homeopath (AH): Tell me about yourself.
van Zandvoort: I am 36 years old, born on November 30, 1958, in Heerlen (the Netherlands). That's in the south near Maastricht. I just did high school; I started doing gymnasium for two years, and then I was kicked off. I was 19 when I completed high school. Then they called me for the army, so I went. Originally I wanted to study either medicine or biology. I was already accepted in biology at one of the universities, but after the army time, I thought, "I am not going to study, I would have to study a long time." That was not my idea of what I should be doing.
AH: How did you come to homeopathy?
van Zandvoort: Well, I was interested in herbal medicine and I ended up going to a naturopathic college nearby in Hilversum. When busy with that, and while homeopathy was part of the study, I found out that Boericke's Materia Medica had a lot of herbal medicine information. This gave food for thought: it meant that a lot of what is homeopathy comes from herbal medicine. That was the start, and then I began refining my homeopathic study. I was always printing study material in the basement of the school. They had a printing machine, an off-set machine there.
AH: Printing for yourself?
van Zandvoort: No, for everyone. In those days it was badly organized. There was a lot of material lying around, but none of the teachers were doing anything with it. So I collected all the material and reorganized the whole thing, and started printing materials.
AH: That's got a familiar ring to it. Is that when you started your compilation work?
van Zandvoort: I have always been a kind of collector, I like collecting things. I started collecting butterflies when I was really young, and later on I started collecting cacti, and other plants. I still collect butterflies, I catch them with my camera now.
AH: Did you collect medicinal plants?
van Zandvoort: Oh, many, yes, which led me into teaching herbal medicine. I still have every piece of study material that we had in that school. It was collected by me. I had the biggest collection of study material that even the teachers had seen. And later on I made sure that the school had a copy of all of that. But then I got mixed up again. I came back years later and went to look at it, just to have this feeling whether or not I really did something, and it was completely scattered again. So it wasn't really worth it, but I still have all that material. Many people have copied it, so they must be happy with it. It was difficult to collect all that stuff.
AH: Some people seem to like copying the results of your hard work. Is this a recurring theme?
van Zandvoort: Yes, I will get to that. So, I finished school in '83, but I was still connected to it. I was coordinating the weekend courses that we had, then I started to teach herbal medicine. I translated some herbal medicine books from German. I made a kind of compact Dutch version, German into Dutch. I had a lot of herbal medicine books by that time, and I wrote some study material for the school that they used while I was still a student there. They used it for quite some years after that. I already had three years of classical homeopathy by that point. So Wiekie and I started our own practice in 1985. Before that we had only slight practice experience with more seasoned colleagues of ours.
AH: So you opened up a consulting practice?
van Zandvoort: Yes. It worked well, and I did some years of practice. I still was connected with the school, but it became less and less. I spent most of the profits on following homeopathic classes, all over the world. I went to Greece to Vithoulkas, then I saw him here in Holland. I went back to Greece three times to study with Vithoulkas, and once to England to the school where he was teaching. In the practice, I first treated most people with herbal medicines, but when I felt I really knew the correct homeopathic remedy, I would give it, but only when it was clear to me.
AH: Otherwise you wouldn't give a remedy.
van Zandvoort: No, I felt that I should not give remedies that don't have any effect, because then people don't come back to you. So I was very careful with that, and I built up the practice in this way. But after a while it meant that nearly the entire practice was about homeopathy. And for that reason I bought a computer in 1987, and I bought MacRepertory to help me in my practice. It was a Macintosh SE. I was comparing the information that Bill Gray had with the Vithoulkas additions to the Synthetic Repertory, and I saw that there were many differences. I liked the Synthetic Repertory, so I started collecting material to add to MacRepertory. I started building that up. And I saw that the authors were not always the same, although they had the same additions. So that's how I became involved in finding out where these additions really came from. That's what I am still trying to find out.
AH: Where does one look?
van Zandvoort: Well, you dive into the materia medica. You have to. Or you dive into the other repertories. That's another possibility. Best is to do both. Because what you see, sometimes, in the repertory, is that there is a certain rubric that is not completely clear, but has certain remedies that you would like to add in, and you don't know exactly where to place it in Kent's Repertory. So you must look up these remedies in the materia medica, and find out what the rubric really was, and then decide whether or not you're going to add all that new information to Kent's Repertory, and if so, where.
AH: So you had to rewrite parts of Kent's Repertory in order to fit all the new information.
van Zandvoort: Yes, I started to put in lots of information. In the beginning, I was really only busy with making it as big as possible. There is really quite a lot that anybody can add to Kent's Repertory. Many people told me, afterwards, when they had the Complete Repertory, that they felt naked using just Kent's.
AH: How were you able to keep everything in order, all the repertories, materia medicas, journal articles, authors, and their sources?
van Zandvoort: I remember from earlier days when I was studying, that everything had to be there on my desk – all the materials to be sure that the study could be complete. Pencil, paper, everything neatly organized, the right books, so I had all the information that I needed on the subject that I was studying. This didn't begin for me with the study of homeopathy, it's a general truth for me. Like with the herbal medicine, I saw that much of the information we had was disorganized, and so I started compiling my own database, to make sure that everything was there, so I didn't miss anything. So that's kind of a thing with me. I didn't want to miss anything. There's an awful lot of information missing in Kent's Repertory, and that's one of the reasons that I began this work.
So that's how it all started. One of the most useful tools has been MacRepertory for doing the repertory changes. That's really been a great help. Otherwise I wouldn't be very far along in this task. I made sure that each research group would use MacRepertory to make it easy for me to keep track of the various research I was directing. It was the perfect database.
AH: How many groups are doing research for you?
van Zandvoort: The most important three were the Boericke group, the Phatak group, and the Boger/Boenninghausen group. Most of the other research has been done by me. I have all these shortcuts with macro-keys, etc. It's like clockwork, very organized and precise. I Know where to put everything so it stays organized. There's not too much that I have to look up anymore. If there is doubt, I just use ReferenceWorks to find where to place the information in the repertory. I use ReferenceWorks every day for that purpose.
So that's how I started doing that. I was busy doing this compilation, just for my own practice. Kent did the same – he did all his work for his own needs, in the beginning, to use in his practice and lecturing, etc. It was his students and his colleagues that pushed him to bring it out, to publish it. So all this time I've been working on the new version, the 3.0 Complete Repertory. I like it as it is now. It's a very good repertory, much more accurate than the old one, and much bigger.
AH: How much bigger?
van Zandvoort: About 50 percent bigger; it has nearly twice as many rubrics as Kent's original. And in terms of additions, right now it has close to 350,000 additions. Where the version that you still use has something like 180,000. So that has nearly been doubled. And better additions. More correct, more accurate.
AH: So, you have confirmed all the additions from the materia medicas and original repertories, but what about the journals?
van Zandvoort: I have used the journals when I could lay my hands on them. That was a difficulty until I met you and Hansjörg Hée, the conservator of the Pierre Schmidt Foundation's library. The old journals are very important, as we know from Andre Saine, because there is a lot of excellent information in them that we don't have anywhere else. I've already copied some articles from the Schmidt library, where the whole article is just this small previously unknown repertory. A repertory on prostate gland, another on the urinary tract, etc. Many of these smaller journals have disappeared, and there are very few complete collections left. So now what I am doing is collecting all this repertory information, sorting it out, checking its reliability, and entering it into the Complete.
AH: Have you been to the University of California/San Francisco Medical School library? They have one of the largest collections of homeopathic literature.
van Zandvoort: David Warkentin gave me a list of what they have. I also have an index of the books that are in Pierre Schmidt Foundation's extensive library, and an index of Julian Winston's books. Recently, Julian sent me Stapf's additions to Hahnemann's Materia Medica Pura. Stapf had put together a collection of provings of different remedies and additional information about existing remedies that came from Hahnemann. And you can't find that book anywhere. Pierre Schmidt didn't have it, even in his library, but Julian had it! What I mostly do is, when I buy a new book I carefully read the preface and introductions, etc., much more now than before. They contain valuable information about what the book was based on, where it comes from, what the information has been taken from, etc. If it's a repertory, it says it's based on this or that materia medica, and with the later materia medicas it says sometimes where, for example, the original provings came from, those kind of things. As an example, Clarke is what we call a secondary materia medica. His dictionary is based on the proving materia medicas, the primary materia medicas. But because it's secondary literature in homeopathy, the structure of the information of the remedy is much more organized than the structure in the originals that just list the provings. So that's why, for example, Clarke and Boericke's materia medicas are so useful, because they have a structure. But, interestingly, Clarke offers proving information and new remedies that no other materia medica has. If you know this, then you can add in that information, you know where to find it.
AH: How many repertories have gone into the Complete?
van Zandvoort: Close to forty repertories and materia medica, and all these other articles. I used a lot of small, sometimes very small repertories because, based on the practitioners they came from, they could be considered reliable. What I actually should have done earlier is to start with that material which was the oldest. Later on, I started to do everything in historical order, to make sure that all the additions that we have really go back to the first person that has ever mentioned them, for reasons of accuracy. Some homeopaths then, and today, are revisionist in what should be purely transcription of previous findings. The information is sometimes molested, inaccurate. This is why I list the sources of all remedies in the Complete. It makes the information more reliable if you feel the source was reliable. You will find in almost all repertories, even new ones, that there are certain remedies that are, for whatever reason, put into the wrong rubric. And if you are going to use that information to prescribe for a patient, you would be missing the simillimum. People's lives depend on the accuracy of our literature; this is why I have been so painstaking in researching, then listing, the original sources, or giving the symptoms in the provings. These remedies are absolutely known to have cured these symptoms. I searched through all the literature, wherever I could find collaboration, based on articles that were written by reliable practitioners.
AH: What are some of the classic drawbacks of repertories?
van Zandvoort: Well, a repertory is an index to the materia medica. It's the back pages of the materia medica, so to say, a register. In order to make a good register, in whatever order, like Kent's hierarchical order, or an alphabetical order, which is more of an index, which means that the things you find in the materia medica, in order to be put into the index, have been cut up in smaller pieces.
So what you normally don't find, at least in Kent's Repertory, is a complete symptom, including modalities, etc. Not in one piece. It's cut up in pieces. It means that you can find all of the information that is in the materia medica, but it's in loose pieces and difficult to use.
You should always go to the materia medica afterwards to conform the remedy so all the pieces knit together and become a cohesive picture. To give you an example, you could have a patient that has, let's say, frontal headaches with stomach pains. And you're going to repertorize that and out come two remedies, let's say, Arsenicum and Nux vomica. And now you go to the materia medica and you see that Nux vomica has frontal headaches, but not in combination with stomach pains. But it can have stomach pains, but they are not related to the frontal headache. But you can see that Arsenicum has the frontal headaches in combination with stomach aches. So that's your remedy. But that's something you only know when you go back to the materia medica. What you can do, of course, is you have a main rubric of headache, in combination with pain in the stomach. But there are a lot of things like that that are not in Kent's Repertory, so we have added a lot of information like that.
Bönninghausen has a lot of these concomitants, symptoms. So the specific symptom that happens at the same time is in another place of the body, and they go together. So that's very valuable information. And since we have added Boger's Bönninghausen Repertory, and Boger's Synoptic Key, you will find more sure information inside the Complete Repertory. In the Mind section, for instance, we used Knerr's Repertory, which is well known for its exact quotings from Hering's Guiding Symptoms materia medica.
AH: What actual changes in structure have you made to Kent's Repertory?
van Zandvoort: Some of the changes in structure were actually Kent's work, but they were never published. It is found back in the final General Repertory, the one that Pierre Schmidt and Harish Chand made. There are some more changes that I did that were not in Kent's Repertory. I moved the Dreams from the Sleep section into the Mind section because many of us felt it's all mind stuff, it's just happening while you sleep. Dreams are all about digesting impressions of the day, and old griefs, and everything that has to do with emotional things and the subconscious. So that's all in the Mind section now. We talked to a lot of people about this, including psychiatrists who are also familiar with homeopathy. And most of them agreed.
I also combined some main rubrics in the Mind section. For example, you had the rubric Talk, and the rubric Talking, and the rubric Talks. And if you see the sub-rubrics, you can't be sure whether or not they really belong to what they are under. Are they under Talk, do they have to be under Talks, do they have to be under Talking? So I combined them. So it's just Talk, Talking, Talks, as being one main rubric, and every sub-rubric that originally was divided in these three is just now in alphabetical order in one main rubric. It makes more sense. If someone really finds out which one should go under which, I would like to change it. But there should be a definition of the exact meaning of all of those. Kent probably split it up for a good reason, but you can't find always the reason, whatever it was. Kent used other rubrics that have the same meaning. You can see why he did it because some repertories mention that specific name in their repertory, and he just took that over. So he used other repertories, and he didn't always look back to see that he already had that information in another term in his repertory.
AH: The amount of work we can do in an hour on a computer with ReferenceWorks, compared to a person with a stack of books with pen and paper, is staggering. And imagining Allen and Hughes working together on Allen's 14-volume encyclopedia through correspondence overseas, it seems unbelievable.
van Zandvoort: Yes, I know exactly. I know for Allen and also for Hughes, they collected material from others. It's not only their work, it's a collection. Like Kent's. They used each other's discoveries. It is hard to imagine that their accomplishments were possible, yet we know it happened. It would be nice to go back 120 years to see how it all worked. The other way around would be nice, too, to have Kent sitting here looking at the monitor, seeing what has become of his work.
AH: How many sources of information did Kent list?
van Zandvoort: That's one of the things I didn't like so much about Kent's Repertory, he doesn't list any sources. He says in some of the writings that he used Allen, he used this and that; he says it's a compilation of sources that he used, but he's not very specific.
AH: How about Künzli?
van Zandvoort: Künzli is specific on what he added to Kent's Repertory. Not so much for the original Kent material itself. By being busy with the Complete Repertory, I've found out a lot of sources that have been used by Kent. He must have had a tremendous amount of information available to be complied. So he and his students must have done a lot of preparing in order to make sure that he had all that information available. He was a great compiler. And he has had great insight into how the structure for the repertory should be. Although he had examples from the past also for that.
AH: Which smaller repertories have you used in your compilation, and how do you choose one over another?
van Zandvoort: I used Jahr, Repertory of the Heart by Snader, Facial Neuralgias by Lutze, all very good repertories. Andre Saine gave me a whole list of repertories years ago that had, according to him, reliable information. I'm busy collecting all that information. Andre has the book reviews from all the old journals in his collection. From these book reviews I can get otherwise obscure information about books, authors, and in-house politics. They, too had rubbish-books a hundred years ago, of course! And there were also excellent books. The early reviews have been a big help to all historians of homeopathy. I would ask Andre or someone else who has studied them, Julian probably. There are a few people that know about them.
Ten years ago I didn't care about what was written in the introductions to he Synthetic Repertory or Vithoulkas' Essences or whatever. I just went for the book, and that's it. Now, that part of the book, before the actual book begins, is very important. Because there you find the cures that you need to decide whether or not, or how, you are going to use it. So what I would like to do is to complete all the chapters of the repertory with all the reliable information I can find, especially from the repertories, just for one main reason: since it's already a repertory, it's easier to add into the Complete. If it's a materia medica, there's much more work to do. So those people did already part of the work for me. They cut it into pieces already, so it's easier to chew. That's the main reason that I use repertories a lot more than materia medicas. But for verification you have to go to the materia medica.
So what I need to do later on, for example, is have one Complete Repertory on, let's say, throat, nose, ears. And a Complete Repertory on the digestive tract. So stomach, abdomen, rectum, stool. Logical combinations of chapters, to bring them out as separate books. In the Complete, there's actually one section that many people don't know about. Concordances. You can have a look in Boger's Bönninghausen Repertory, the last part that has the concordances, which are remedies that follow well, divided in groups. He gives as an example: Suppose you have given Aconite to someone, it worked well, and he's left with some symptoms that you have to translate to rubrics to find the follow-up remedy. And what Bönninghausen has done, he has divided these symptoms in groups, so if the main symptoms left over after Aconite worked well are mind symptoms, he found out which specific follow-up remedies come forward more for mind symptoms after Aconite. And he has found out which remedies come out more when they have extremity symptoms, and digestive tract symptoms, circulation symptoms, or sleep symptoms. That's all in the Complete. I have to write something about it, because most people won't know how to use it. It can be very useful. Suppose you have just done a normal repertorization with the follow-up symptoms, and you are completely in doubt about, let's say, three polychrests that you have to use. Of course, it's always good to study the materia medica, but you can, in this case, also go to the Relationships of Remedies section and find out which of these three polychrests is the most logical if it's about mind symptoms, after Aconite. Which one is about extremity symptoms after Aconite? It will be there. What I would like to do is make that a separate book, too. The Complete Relationships of Remedies. There are many authors who write about that. Lippe has a lot of information about it, Jahr has a lot of information, of course Knerr, Hering, Clarke, everyone tells you something about it. And it's important. We know some of it, but there is more.
AH: Do you see Geukens?
van Zandvoort: I see him sometimes; when he had seminars I used to go there a couple of days. I don't go to all these seminars constantly anymore. It would be too much. Because there are so many. And then I have to make sure, these days, that I stay in touch with the other homeopathic teachers we have, because they are also good indicators about what a repertory should be like, etc. That's how it works. Then every once in a while I fly to Switzerland and connect with the Swiss group for a couple of days. The Swiss group is people that offered to help me, years ago, in correcting the Mind section. They wanted a good repertory to work with. It was actually based on Künzli's idea of making a more Complete Repertory. This group tried to convince Künzli to make use of the Complete Repertory. And actually they began working on that, and then Künzli died. So he never had the opportunity to see his idea come to light. When Künzli died some years ago, I had met with him twice, and talked with him. Not enough, I would have liked to have talked more, but I lived in Holland and he in Switzerland. But this study group that he had, with all these people, they had a very good connection with him. And the two people that had the best connection with him, Dario Spinedi and Hansjörg Hée, are collaborating with me. We had a pretty good idea about what he wanted. All that Boger-Bönninghausen stuff he registered. Künzli created the organization for incorporating Boger-Bönninghausen into the Complete, although he's gone. All the work was already done on paper, but not yet programmed into a computer.
AH: What is homeopathy like in Holland?
van Zandvoort: Homeopathy in Holland is quite well established. There is still no official recognition, but there are many doctors and non-doctors practicing. Classical homeopathy is well represented amongst the 2,000 or so homeopaths, and the level of those that practice classical homeopathy is quite high. Holland, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland are the best developed countries for classical homeopathy in Europe at this time (1994). The doctors are the best organized, and the non-doctors have several organizations that will be united into one in the next years. There is a lot to do about homeopathy in the European Community and many groups try to establish European rules their way. Lots of politics are involved.
