The Materia Medica Library: Six Classic Books in One Place

Every BHMS student ends up with a shelf of Materia Medica books and a habit of reading only one of them. The library on HomeopathyWorld puts six classic texts side by side, so that you can read what Boericke, Kent and Allen each said about a remedy without hunting through three volumes. This guide shows you how to browse it, search it, and read a remedy properly.

Before you start

• Find the library. In the sidebar it is Materia Medica, and the page is headed Materia Medica Literature Library. You need a free account to use it.
• Know what is inside. There are six classic books: Boericke, Allen's Keynotes, Boger, Kent, Tyler and Farrington. Together they hold 10,070 entries covering 789 remedies. The line under the page title shows the current counts.
• Know the two ways in. You can browse by book, or search across all the books at once. There is also an AI search for when you only have a symptom and no remedy name.

Step 1: Browse by book

The opening screen lists the six books. Each one shows its author, year, and how many remedies and entries it holds.

1. Click a book to open it. You now see only the remedies that book covers.
2. Use the A–Z strip to jump to a letter. Greyed-out letters have no remedies in that book. Press Clear to remove the letter filter.
3. Change the order with the sort menu: Name (A–Z), Name (Z–A) or Most sources.
4. Switch between the grid and list layouts with the two buttons beside the sort menu. The grid shows a short description for each remedy, while the list fits more on the screen.
5. Results come 60 to a page. Use Previous and Next at the bottom.
6. Press All books to go back to the book list.

Each remedy card shows its abbreviation, its kingdom, its name and its full Latin name. Small badges show which books cover it, by the author's surname.

Tip: sort by Most sources when you are revising. The remedies covered by the most books come first. These are usually the polychrests your examiners expect you to know best.

Step 2: Find a remedy by name

The search box at the top searches all six books at once. It matches the remedy's name, its abbreviation and its full name. So "nux", "nux-v" and "strychnos" all find Nux vomica. The results line tells you how many remedies matched.

This box finds remedies by name. It does not search the text of the entries, so typing a symptom here will not help. For that, use the AI search below.

Step 3: Search by symptoms with AI Semantic Search

On the opening book list you will see a panel marked AI Semantic Search with a BETA label. It is there for the moment every student knows: you remember the symptom but not the remedy.

1. Clear the main search box, and make sure you are on the book list rather than inside a book. The panel only shows there.
2. Describe the symptom in plain words, as the patient might say it. For example: "burning pain worse at night", or "fear of the dark, wants company".
3. Press Search. You get up to twelve matching passages from across all the books. Each one shows the remedy, the section it comes from, and the opening lines.
4. Click a passage to open that remedy.

A few things to know before you rely on it:

• It uses your AI allowance. Each AI search counts towards the same daily allowance as the Study Assistant: 30 a day on the free plan, reset at midnight India time. If the allowance is used up, the search simply returns nothing until the next day.
• It matches meaning, not exact words. Phrase the symptom the way the old books would, with its modality ("worse", "better", "at night"), and the results improve.
• It is a pointer, not a repertorisation. It finds passages that read like your description. It does not weigh one symptom against another. For a real case, use the repertory and bring the shortlist back here to read.

Step 4: Read a remedy page

Open any remedy and you get its full page:

• The header shows the name, abbreviation and full name, along with the kingdom and family, thermal state and miasm tags where these are recorded.
• The summary is a short description, followed by a Constitutional type card when one is recorded.
• The entries follow, grouped by book. Each group is headed with the book's title and author. Within a book, sections follow a clinical order: Mind first, then Head, and so on down to the generals, Relationship and Dose.

This is where the library earns its place. Read the Mind section in Boericke, then the same section in Kent, and notice what each author chose to stress.

Reading one book or all of them

The page shows different books depending on how you arrived:

• From inside a book, you see only that book's entries, and the back button at the top carries the book's title. Use your browser's back button to return to the same book and letter you were browsing.
• From the main search box, you see every book that covers the remedy, one after another.

So when you want the whole picture of a remedy, find it by name from the search box rather than from inside a book.

Arriving from the repertory

When you open a remedy from a repertorisation, the page knows where you came from. The Materia Medica tab of the remedy panel links to one book at a time, or to View All Books, and Full Detail opens the complete page. The button at the top then reads Back to Analysis and takes you straight back to your grid. Use this to check the repertory's shortlist against the actual text.

Bookmarks

At the moment the Bookmark button appears on Organon aphorism pages, not on remedy pages. Your saved aphorisms collect on the Bookmarks page at /bookmarks. To come back to a remedy, use your browser's own bookmarks, or simply search its name. It takes a second.

The free Materia Medica pages

You do not need an account to read the basics. The public Materia Medica pages list remedies from A to Z, and each one has a page of its own. That page gives the key facts where recorded (kingdom, family, source, thermal state, constitution and dose), a short description, a selection of excerpts from the classic texts, and links to related remedies in the same family.

They are useful for a quick look on the bus, or for sending a link to a classmate. The full multi-book text, the AI search and the link to the repertory are in the library itself.

Common mistakes

• Reading only one author. Each book has its own emphasis. Allen's Keynotes is short and sharp, while Kent's lectures are full portraits. Read at least two authors for any remedy you want to know.
• Typing symptoms into the name search. It will not find them. Use AI Semantic Search.
• Treating AI search results as a diagnosis. They are passages that sound like your words, and nothing more.
• Memorising lists instead of pictures. See How to memorise Materia Medica for a method that lasts.

Try it now

Open the Materia Medica library, sort by Most sources, and read the Mind section of the first remedy in two different books. Or browse the free Materia Medica pages without signing in.

Next in this series

• Repertorisation step by step
• The Organon and the AI Study Assistant
• Getting started with HomeopathyWorld