It must be admitted that many do mechanical work and fail to realize that any other kind is possible. The physician must read over and over the rubrics in the repertory in order to learn what is in it and how symptoms are expressed. Many fail to use the repertory because they think of symptoms in pathological language or because they look for expressions in the language of tradition. Both of these express sickness in the language of the layman and the repertory must be the index of the materia medica. Every effort to convert either the materia medica or the repertory into the language of traditional medicine must result in total failure.
Technical language condenses the thought of a given sickness.
All who know how to use a repertory succeed, and not one has ever discarded it. Yet these are only the first and simplest differences to be mentioned. The inexperienced physician in our art trains his mind to lump and condense and concentrate and this leads in the opposite direction to what is required. We have large groups or rubrics but these are next split up into conditions, circumstances and modalities until every least difference in time, place, degree and manner is brought before the mind so that distinction and individualization may appear. The proper use of the repertory will lead to correct offhand prescribing in simple cases, in from ten to twenty years.