New World Veterinary Repertory von Pitcairn Richard H. / Jensen Thacher Wendy, Rezension

The New World Veterinary Repertory

I’ve been using this repertory since it came out a few years back, but in the digital version. As a veterinarian, it’s my go to repertory in all my case work. Why? It was carefully written from great source material on a great backbone (Boger-Boenninghausen, primarily), and painstakingly cleared of rubrics that are of no use to me in my animal patients.

I can’t know anything about sensations, for example, because I can’t ask my patient what something feels like. Multiple rubrics about types of pain are similarly of no use to me, with rare (often assumed) exception. Mental and emotional states are similarly a largely closed door to the veterinary homeopath, and are an area where interpretation of the behaviors we see could be easily misconstrued. Is that dog biting out of anger or fear? Is the remaining animal of a twosome, one of which has died, really depressed or more curious as to where her friend has gone?

As a long time veterinary homeopath, I really appreciate the work that’s gone into this valuable volume. I got to take part in the repertory winnowing early on, a massive effort of deleting rubrics that we simply couldn’t identify in our animal patients. In the end, Drs. Pitcairn and Jensen shouldered that work, and besides removing what was not of use, added some rubrics and remedies from carefully chosen sources (Kent, Hering, Jahr and others) to enhance our search for the simillimum. Few are up to this exacting work. We practitioners are not well served by massive, all inclusive rubrics nor by tiny rubrics. Drs. Pitcairn and Jensen painstakingly searched several reliable references to be sure that rubrics chosen were of clinical utility in animal work. Practitioners themselves, their bent was to make this repertory eminently useful.

The result is a finely honed, well organized tome that saves the busy practitioner time in his work, while broadening his understanding of what symptoms may apply to his case. The extensive cross references help me find rubrics that more accurately describe what I’m seeing in my animal patients.

I’m very happy to see the finely made hard bound version now, printed on high quality paper with section indents for easy access. I may just leave my MacRepertory version more often to explore the avenues that this volume can lead me to.