During one of the breaks at the LIGA congress in Lucerne in October 2006 I picked up Homopathische Leit-Bilder by Alexander Gothe and Julia Drinnenberg at the booth of Haug Verlag. Leafing through the many pages with cartoons I couldn't resist laughing out loud regularly. This, I realized, is how learning should be. Fun!
Becoming a homeopath is usually a call coming from the heart, based on a genuine desire that we share with Hahnemann as he expressed it in 1 of his Organon, namely to heal the sick. That homeopathy offers the possibility, as his next paragraph suggests, to realise the highest ideal of cure through a rapid, gentle and permanent restoration of health, is enough for many to arouse serious interest.
During the training and practice of homeopathy, though, the mind turns out to be an important instrument in making Hahnemanns promise come true. Memorizing, analysing, repertorising, theorising, philosophising our art of healing is full of it, and rightfully so. But sometimes the balance between heart and mind is skewed a bit. A good shaking of the belly is just what the doctor ordered. The ability to laugh about each other, and ourselves, about our role as homeopaths or patients, is healing in itself. And Alexander and Julia have offered this very remedy to us with this marvellous book.
Cartoons exaggerate: that is both their strength and their weakness. By enlarging an aspect to the extreme it makes for easy memorising; the shadow side is that patients will usually not match the caricature. But isn't that true of all knowledge, that true wisdom is rather based on the ability to forget? After feeding the mind with knowledge, further development is only possible if what has been learned is let go of again to be able to welcome newer and deeper knowledge.
Having said that, I wish all those who will pick up this book a joyous learning experience.
Harry van der Zee, publisher
Reprinted with the permission of The Society of Homeopaths (from "The Homeopath" Journal, Winter 2007 edition). Reviewed by Petra Wood.
As a community education tutor I am always on the lookout for potential teaching aids, so this book caught my interest as a visual aid.
The book is set out in large format and covers 50 well-known remedies. As in any materia medica which is restricted in the number of remedies it deals with, the choice of remedies seems a little random. Many of the remedies included are major polychrests but also a lesser-used remedy slipped in, Aethusa. The major nosodes Carcinosin, Medorrhinum, Psorinum and Tuberculinum are covered, but Syphilinum is missing.
Each remedy is introduced with one page of text, including a short description of the original substance with regard to the doctrine of signatures, followed by three pages of cartoons in colour. For some reason Chelidonium has only two pages of cartoons. This is a small glitch in the general layout, which otherwise is very clear and accessible. Remedies have headers in alternating colours and the remedy name is printed on each page for ease of navigation.
The remedy information is well researched with a strong emphasis on the different stages of pathology. The text is bulleted into paragraphs throughout but I found this rather forced sometimes. Highlighting the keynotes throughout the text instead would have very much improved the ease of access to information and would have helped the visual impact.
At times the book seems unclear as to which audience it is aimed at. On the one hand the author over-simplifies when explaining the miasms. On the other hand the use of medical language in disease names is quite advanced. This becomes particularly difficult when it combines with problems stemming from its translation from the original German. For example Morbus Bechterew might be well known on the continent, but it is usually referred to as Ankylosing Spondylitis in the English speaking world.
There are other little hiccups stemming from translation: For example 'obstipation' might be found in the dictionary but using 'constipation' instead would have been more helpful.
The biggest assets of the book, however, are undoubtedly the cartoons. If the book does nothing else for you - it will make you laugh! The author has to be credited for his ability to provide the necessary information to the illustrator who did a marvellous job of putting keynotes into pictures. I would have liked to see an index or mini-repertory included in the book as a quick reference to finding a remedy when a particular picture has stuck in your mind.
I will be using this book as a teaching aid and can surely recommend it for that. First and second year students will probably find it very useful, too. I would also consider it for a busy waiting room or simply for its humour.
Reprinted with the permission of Homeopathic Links, Volume 20, Winter 2007. Reviewed by Francis Treuherz, UK.
What fun! - a hilarious illustrated book of materia medica translated from the original German. We are all invited to laugh at serious matters. Perhaps all these years we have been taking ourselves too seriously. Here are 50 remedies, a page of descriptive text for each one, concentrating on the causes, course and development of the illness and the individual. Then there are approximately 14 full-colour captioned cartoons for each remedy, on large glossy pages just smaller than A4. I really enjoyed this book.
I am not sure if anyone will buy this book mainly for the text but it is well written, accurate, lively, and based on a comprehensive bibliography of classic and contemporary material.
It is the cartoons which provide the added value; they are funny, and an exciting new approach to study. Here each cartoon illustrates a symptom, often a peculiar and characteristic symptom. Imagine a haughty constipated traveller sitting on a toilet with her suitcase - Platina. Or a child under an umbrella asking mother if God also gets wet when it rains - Calcarea carbonica. The only book I can think of which is close in style is the Song of Symptoms by PH Sharp, first published in 1949 under the pseudonym of Patersimilias. It is now only available second hand or in an Indian reprint. In that earlier book each remedy has a poem and a caricature.
This book of cartoons does have some problems and they are mainly to do with language. I firmly believe that translations should where possible be written by native speakers of the new language. This book was translated into English by a German; we do not know if she was also a homeopath. The captions do not always use the common homeopathic language of symptoms from materia medica and repertory, many of which would not have required a translation at all, as the terms already exist. So some of the (unintended) hilarity arises from the mistakes or the clumsy Germanic turn of phrase. Aethusa is shown laughably as an old man with a beard in a baby's pram as a hypocratical face instead of Hippocratic. Natrum muriaticum has persevering thoughts instead of persistent, while Natrum sulphuricum has grievances for grief. And no one today uses the term obstipation - Bryonia.
Despite these shortcomings this light-hearted addition to our bookshelves makes me laugh, which must be a good way to learn. How will I ever look at an egg timer again without thinking I shall die when the sand runs out - Aconite! It deals fully and frankly with lavatorial and anatomical matters. The last cartoon in the book shows a male Zincum patient who urinates better sitting down: he is on a chair with his flies open, facing the toilet bowl: you could not make it up.
