Reprinted with the permission of The Society of Homeopaths, from "The Homeopath" Journal, Winter 2005 edition). Reviewed by Francis Treuherz.
This is the most erudite and recondite materia medica I have ever read. It exceeds even the arcane scholarship of the fastidious Otto Leeser whose chemical explanations of inorganic substances laced his mineral family materia medica with more chemistry than I ever understood. Frans Vermeulen has excelled himself with an edition of materia medica of a family or series never before published. OA Julian wrote a book on nosodes that has been badly translated as Treatise on Dynamized Micro Immunotherapy Isopathic Concertology. Until now it was a major source about remedies made from the products of disease.
This new book starts with taxonomy of bacteria and viruses on the front and rear end papers. Using these charts one can immediately see the relationship of all the bacteria and viruses, and the homeopathic medicines that are prepared from them - if any. For there are bacteria that have not been used as a medicine. I suspect that the publication of the information in this book will lead to some more provings of new remedies, and some real provings of partly or hardly proved remedies, for there are many rudimentary materia medica pictures here in this volume.
Each material is described in detail with some excellent typographical devices to enhance, illustrate or summarise the information, before the materia medica is given, that is, where it exists. Here we can learn about the diseases and their symptoms and pathology as well as the bacteria and viruses. At one stroke, this book replaces our allopathic textbooks of infectious diseases as all the material appears together in an integrated fashion.
There is a set of introductory chapters, explaining not only the nomenclature and classification but also the differences between nosodes and vaccines for example, and as many questions as answers.
Here is a full explanation of the mysteries of the Bach and Paterson bowel nosodes, Borrelia and Brucellosis. I have only ever prescribed Malandrinum once but after reading this I can see a couple of cases where I missed it. The 'tuberculinums' are differentiated, the gonorrhoeas are disseminated, the spirochaetes are delineated. Avian flu and Oscillococcinum are properly described. I have already used the book to assist a student working on a project on MRSA. I looked in vain for Candida and realised it is a fungus, and must appear in another volume, instead I found Campylobacter and Herpes and more.
There is a rich bibliography at the end, although there are many other references that are not fully sourced. There is a thorough glossary, and an index, which usefully capitalises remedy names within the rest of the information. This book, like so much of Frans Vermeulen's work, will rapidly become an indispensable modern classic, and richly deserves to do well.
Reprinted with the permission of Homeopathic Links, Volume 19, Spring 2006. Reviewed by Dr J Rozencwajg, New Zealand.
Another masterpiece by a master writer and master homeopath.
Most of the usual materia medicas I have read are alphabetical compilations of remedies and symptoms. Some are written like shopping lists and are as enjoyable to read as the phone book, others are more reader-friendly and engaging; all convey useful information about common and rare remedies, but I always end up missing a few remedies, asking myself why those were selected and not others and being painfully aware that every author has copied from an earlier one, sometimes word for word, rarely with much originality.
Not this time.
Monera is the first volume of a series of six entitled Spectrum Materia Medica. Frans' idea is to go systematically through the animal kingdom from the smallest to the biggest ones, through the periodical table, the plants, the synthetic substances, the imponderables, using the modern scientific taxonomy so that nothing is missed. This way, each and every substance available that could become a homeopathic remedy will have a chance and there will be no arbitrary decision about what to include and what to exclude.
Monera is about microscopic life forms: viruses and bacteria; it is the "Book of the Nosodes", all of them, once and for all.
Using the microbiological classification for a materia medica allows us to understand the closeness of some types of bacteria and viruses, as well as the relationships between remedies.
The legends and the histories of diseases like the plague or leprosy are well detailed and unsurprisingly relate so clearly to the provings or the clinical use that one wonders why some eminent homeopaths refuse to admit the facts.
Vermeulen used all the material available: textbooks of medicine and microbiology, clinical books, history books and collections of tales, regular provings, meditative and dream provings, clinical reports and websites. Everything he wrote has references and can easily be checked.
And it is never boring; it reads like a thriller, actually.
The history of a disease related to the microorganism studied, with or without the legends, is followed by clear clinical descriptions with symptoms and signs in such details it could become a blueprint for studying clinical diagnosis; what I most liked in those descriptions are the little facts that allow a precise clinical diagnosis, like how to differentiate between the eruptions of measles and scarlet fever according to the direction of reddening of a macule that has been compressed and has become white. No need for lab work when you know that! Then the materia medica, proving and clinical use is described, with cases. It becomes very easy to correlate symptoms and signs of a named disease with symptoms of a proving, demonstrating once again that a pathology that can be associated directly with a substance is in fact a proving, albeit a crude one.
When vaccines have been created for that microorganism, a study of the complications of the vaccines is also made as well as the homeopathic indications of the potentised vaccines.
The Bowel Nosodes are integrated in their rightful place, not artificially separated, and although all the material is taken from available texts and nothing really new has been added, the clarity and precision of the presentation allows one to understand and assimilate the use of those remedies a lot better than by reading the original texts separately - at least for me.
I could rave for pages about this book. Just read it: it is worth every cent, and when you finish it, I am quite sure you will preorder the next volume.
Reprinted with the permission of The Alliance of Registered Homeopaths, from 'Homeopathy in Practice', Autumn 2006 edition. Reviewed by Theresa Partington, MARH.
Hold on to this thought: of the 100 trillion cells in the average adult human body, only 10 trillion are human. Most of the rest are bacteria 'with a few other parasites, fungi and miscellaneous riff-raff thrown in for good measure'.
Like many modern works this book is based on the assumption that biological categorisation is of interest to homeopaths. It assumes that it is helpful to look at organisms from which remedies are already made or may be made in the future in the context of 'family'. If we are going to go down this path, says Vermeulen, then we should look at how we are doing our classifying. Is it good enough to include Fungi under Plants? No, it isn't. If we regard minerals as living organisms we have six kingdoms: Monera, Protista, Fungi, Plantae, Animalia and Mineralia. Protista are unicellular, nucleated organisms (such as amoebae, algae and sporozoans, including the malarial Plasmodium) and Monera are unicellular organisms whose genetic material is not enclosed in a nucleus i.e. bacteria. Viruses are not regarded as living organisms at all as they have no means of self-replication, cannot metabolise and are inert outside living cells, but they do find a place in this book, tacked on to another kingdom in literature as in life!
The book is divided into sections and subsections. For example the Phylum Endospora has two classes, Bacilli and Clostridia. The Bacilli have two orders, Bacillales and Lactobacillales. Within the Bacillales we have three families, Bacillaceae, Listericeae and Staphylococcaceae.
Within the Balillaceae (Genus bacillus) we have detailed accounts of Bacillus brevis and Bacillus anthracis. Common to the genus is the ability to form endospores which can remain viable for hundreds of years and in their dormant state are highly resistant to heat, irradiation, disinfectants etc. Bacillus brevis gave us the first antibiotic to be produced on a commercial scale, Tyrothricin; sadly it killed more than it cured. Like other synthetic products of bacteria that have been potentised, it has a place here. Anthracis is, however, the better known. Vermeulen gives us a description of the bacillus and of the three types of anthrax disease (cutaneous, pulmonary and intestinal) and a page of historical context. Did you know anthrax was likely to have been responsible for the 5th and 6th plagues of Egypt as described in Exodus? Then, of course, we have the remedy - Anthracinum. We have a history of this (unproved) remedy and reference to first sources and to a modern discourse on it from one Jeff Baker (1990). We are told how many cases, and whose, produced which symptoms. There follow two modern and one older case for good measure.
This is just the goods on one bacterium of thirteen listed from one Phylum, of which there are seven. So you can get some idea of the scope and detail contained in this book! Non-bacteriologists amongst us might find the prospect of just negotiating our way around all this Latin daunting but fear not! If, for example, you are interested either in Weil's Disease or the nosode but wouldn't have a clue where to find it, just look at the front inner cover where there is a family tree (or, more correctly, a taxonomy map) and there it is - Weil's disease nosode in the same species section as Lyme nosode, Syphilinum and Framboesinum, the nosode of Yaws. (The lesions look like raspberries, in case you were wondering.)
In Monera you will find everything you ever wanted to know about bowel nosodes, possibly more: how Morgan gaertner should not properly be viewed as a sub-type of Morgan, how Sycotic Co. should be seen as derived from a member of the Neisseriaceae family, along with Medorrhinum and Meningococcinum, rather than the Enterobacteriaceae family where all the other bowel nosodes can be found. Medorrhinum, understandably, dominates this section of the book and Medorrhinum americana with its conventional and meditative provings also gets five pages.
Another remedy connection that becomes obvious from the map is that between Leprominium and the various Tuberculinums. Turning to the appropriate section of the book, you will find the Tuberculinums differentiated in great detail, and also Johneinum (from para tuberculosis), proved as a remedy in 2002 by Louis Klein. BCG, the vaccine, is here with a digression as to its suggested protective influence against DPT damage, and to its anti-cancer properties, and so is BCG the (proved) remedy. The connection between Leprosy and Tuberculosis involving an element of cross-immunity and the alternating rise and fall of the two diseases in Europe can be understood by seeing how close to each other the two bacteria are. Leprominium is then compared to Syphilinum, Carcinosin and Tuberculinum; the mentals are very different from all those, incidentally, but I think the point is that there is no a priori reason why it shouldn't be as great a nosode as the others. The fact that we all use one particular nosode from a bacterial species, is a bit like always using Lachesis when another snake remedy, albeit with many common snakey symptoms, may well be more appropriate. The first remedy becomes the polychrest almost by default.
And then there are the viruses - little strands of nucleic acid categorised in part by the number of strands of DNA and RNA, stimulants to, evolutionary change and adaptation as'well as illness. Now I hadn't realised that Chicken pox (Varicella) would be in a different group from Smallpox (Variolinum). There may not be any significance in this but I suspect the early practitioners who recommended Variolinum as prophylactic and treatment for chicken pox were unaware of the distinction: the chicken pox and herpes viruses actually look more like the glandular fever virus. I am not saying that the form of a virus determines how we should use the nosode but it does provide food for thought and channels for further investigation.
To conclude, Monera is a highly ordered ramble along which you can probably find all you want to know about bacteriological and virological disease and the history and materia medica of nosodes of all kinds. It is brilliant! The book is a real classic.
Are you still holding on to that thought? I am not sure where it will get you, but it is an impressive fact, isn't it?
