Glossary
Every difficult term of the classical literature, in plain words.
Foundations
- Potency
- The strength of a homeopathic preparation, expressed as a number with a scale letter — 6C, 30C, 200C. Each C-step dilutes one part in a hundred and shakes vigorously. Higher numbers mean greater dilution, not greater strength of original substance.
- Trituration
- The grinding of the original substance with milk-sugar to make it soluble enough to begin the dilution process; the first step for insoluble materials.
- Mother tincture
- The starting alcohol extract of a plant or other material, labelled with the Latin name and pharmacy symbol (Ø), from which dilutions are prepared.
- Proving
- The structured testing of a substance on healthy volunteers, recording every symptom produced, to build the remedy's portrait.
- Simillimum
- The 'most similar' remedy — the one whose proving picture best matches the patient's whole pattern.
- Vital force
- The old term for the body's self-healing capacity — what modern physiology would call regulation, repair and immunity working together.
Prescribing terms
- Keynote
- A striking, characteristic symptom that strongly suggests a remedy — like 'burning better from heat' for Arsenicum.
- Totality of symptoms
- The whole pattern — mind, body, modalities, peculiarities — rather than any single complaint.
- Constitution
- The person's lifelong pattern of reactivity and build; constitutional remedies treat the person, not the moment.
- Modalities
- The factors that worsen (aggravations) or relieve (ameliorations) symptoms — heat, cold, motion, time of day, company.
- Aggravation
- A temporary worsening of symptoms after the remedy, once interpreted as a sign of action.
- Concomitant
- A symptom accompanying the chief complaint that completes the picture.
- Alternation
- Symptoms that swap sides or change places — 'now the head, now the bowels'.
- Never-well-since
- A complaint dating from a specific event — a grief, a drug, a fever — that shaped everything after.
Materia medica terms
- Affinity
- The organs or systems a remedy was traditionally thought to act on most.
- Diathesis
- An inherited tendency toward certain complaints — the 'rheumatic diathesis', the 'gouty diathesis'.
- Nosode
- A remedy prepared from disease material itself — Psorinum from scabies, Tuberculinum from tuberculosis — recording the disease's portrait.
- Sarcode
- A remedy prepared from healthy tissue secretions, by contrast with nosodes.
- Antipsoric
- A remedy of the chronic, inherited tendency — Sulphur stands at the head of the class.
- Repertory
- The index of symptoms cross-referenced to remedies — the symptom-to-remedy dictionary of the library.
- Rubrics
- The symptom categories of the repertory — 'MIND, anxiety, midnight'.
- High potency / low potency
- The dilution convention: below 12C is 'low' (some original molecules remain), above is 'high'.
Old clinical language (as the books use it)
- Cachexia
- The wasted, depleted state of long chronic illness — thin, sallow, exhausted.
- Chlorosis
- The 'green sickness' of young women — iron-deficiency anaemia with its flushed-but-tired face.
- Scrofula
- Chronically enlarged, unhealthy glands of childhood — the pre-antibiotic tonsil-and-gland picture.
- Marasmus
- The melting, wasting state of infants who fail to thrive.
- Quinsy
- Peritonsillar abscess — the one-sided throat swelling of the old books.
- Dropsy
- Generalised fluid retention — the era's name for heart and kidney failure's swelling.
- Typhoid state
- The low, dull, drowsy fever with its dark face and muttering delirium.
- Hydrophobia
- Rabies — the water-spasm of the old books.
- Hectic fever
- The wasting fever of chronic infection, with its flush and sweat.
- Vicarious
- A discharge or symptom appearing in place of another — 'the skin acting for the lungs'.
- Metastasis
- A complaint that migrates from one system to another — rheuma that 'flies to the heart'.
- Idiosyncrasy
- An unusual personal sensitivity to a substance — the era's term for allergy.