Introduction
** COMPLETE REPERTORY 2008 NOW AVAILABLE **
Roger van Zandvoort’s repertories first began as a personal project, a computer database of corrections and additions to the repertory compiled by James Tyler Kent towards the end of the nineteenth century. (You can read an account of this in his 1994 Interview with Greg Bedayn.) Kent’s work was itself a compilation from a large number of sources, and became the principal standard, at least in the English-speaking world, for the next 100 years.
Growth in repertory additions, Kent to CR2008
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Working from this starting point, the Complete Repertory evolved through several editions into a resource several times the size of the original, incorporating some 40 other repertories and new remedies from provings conducted since Kent’s time. Many revisions were made to its structure and layout to improve clarity and consistency. It provides a comprehensive reference for homeopaths working primarily from a perspective similar to Kent’s. Further details can be found in the Repertory Guide.
Through his and others’ work on the older sources, Roger became interested in other equally valid approaches to repertorisation, and while some of this work was integrated into the Complete Repertory, it became increasingly obvious that the fundamental structure of a Kentian-style repertory was not so well suited to these other approaches.
In 2002-3, the project took a new direction and a new structural arrangement of the repertory, the Repertorium Universale, was introduced. In this repertory, Kent’s basic structure gave way to one which successfully married Kent’s approach with that of the older sources. This allowed much fuller use to be made of methods such as Bönninghausen’s and gave homeopaths far greater flexibility and versatility in the way they could approach the repertorisation of a case. The repertory allowed complete symptoms to be reliably constructed from the sum of their parts, rather than relying on finding an existing record of the exact, or closest possible symptom.
Since both arrangements of the repertory were created from the same database, in 2005 the two repertories were made available together, with the user able to choose whichever structural format they preferred to work with.
However, few in the homeopathic profession have adopted the new repertory structure, showing a continued preference for the Kentian structure of the Complete Repertory, so for the 2008 edition, Roger has returned to the Complete Repertory and concentrated on structural modifications within it to enhance visibility and ease of use of various sections and rubrics (see the 2008 edition page for details).
The Complete Repertory and Repertorium Universale are contained in RUBY (donationware) which can be downloaded from this site for browsing and submitting repertory additions.
