Kent or Bönninghausen: choosing the right repertory for the case in front of you

Two different instruments

Students often treat repertories as interchangeable, assuming bigger is better. They are built on genuinely different logic, and knowing which suits a case is a real clinical skill.

Kent''s Repertory

Kent''s is hierarchical and particular-rich. Organised head to foot, with an extensive Mind section placed first, it excels when you have:

• A well-defined, richly detailed chronic case
• Strong mental and emotional symptoms the patient has expressed clearly
• Specific, localised particulars with their own modalities

Its strength is granularity: there is usually a rubric for precisely what your patient described. Its weakness is the same thing — with roughly 68,000 rubrics it is easy to over-specify, land in a rubric with four remedies, and mistake a small list for a confirmed answer.

Bönninghausen''s Therapeutic Pocket-Book

Bönninghausen''s rests on a different principle: the generalisation of modalities. A modality observed in one part is treated as potentially applying to the patient as a whole. It is far smaller — around 2,700 rubrics — and its degrees run to four rather than three.

It suits:

• Acute cases, where you have few symptoms but clear modalities
• Cases with strong generals and sparse mentals — the patient who cannot tell you much about their inner life but knows precisely that everything is worse for motion and better for warmth
• Injuries and one-sided cases where a full chronic picture simply is not available

A rule of thumb

Rich mentals and detailed particulars → Kent. Few symptoms but clear modalities → Bönninghausen.

If a sparse acute case gives you almost nothing in Kent, that is not a failure of the case — it is the wrong instrument.

On grades

Bönninghausen''s native scale runs to four degrees, Kent''s to three. If your software flattens everything to three, a Bönninghausen degree-4 — the strongest mark the author could give — is being silently downgraded. Check how your tool handles this; ours preserves the original scale, which is why grading in the repertory shows more than three levels on some rubrics.

Both, sometimes

Running a case through both and comparing is a legitimate technique, not indecision. Where the two agree independently, the indication is genuinely stronger than either alone. Where they disagree, the disagreement usually points at your rubric selection — see why fewer rubrics work better.