Hi,

If you have a copy of Materia Medica Pura have a look in Volume 1 (B.Jain edition) at the chapter called 'Preamble'. Hahnemann provides a couple of case examples to explain his method of prescribing.
Each and every symptom builds up a symptom-combination, a kind of grand characteristic, that is truly unique to one remedy. There is no guesswork. There is no piecemeal organization of symptoms. Each and every individual symptom is correlated to the proving symptoms referenced by numbers in the MMP. There is a differential done on each distinguishing symptom.

Boenninghausen was not satisfied with the Repertories of his day. The TPB was designed as an index for beginners to access the growing Materia Medica. Boenninghausen was able to see order where other people only saw a chaotic mass of unrelated symptoms. In many instances provings were fragmentary or incomplete. He formulated a way to generalize symptoms through analogy, breaking down characteristics and positioning them generally throughout the index, so that - this is the truly genius part - when recombining them, the potential was created to form many new characteristic combinations that are not necessarily in the provings, but can be clinically verified. In order to use Boenninghausen's method of repertorization you have to FIRST study the characteristic distinguishing symptoms so that you can recognize them in the patient and, just as importantly, know how to combine them in the rubrics of the TPB. It is not just a matter of flicking through pages of the TPB and wondering if this rubric suits...and hoping to fall into the right prescription. You would probably end up with Sulphur or a remedy that can't be correlated in any sufficient manner to any proving.

Boenninghausen's method requires exactness and precision. You have to be very precise about the symptom you hear and observe in the patient before applying it to the index. A case might come down to 3 or 4 general rubrics, and it-is-a-simple-matter then, of finding the correct remedy based on a grand characteristic combination. Any remaining symptoms in the case are prescribed for in the same fashion but also taking into account the remedy relationship of the previous medicine to the next. Boenninghausen charted these overlaps between remedy actions in the TPB Chapter VII, Relationship of Remedies, also known as Concordances (but with further additions) in the Boger-Boenninghausen Repertory.

Boenninghausen gives directions in the original foreward to the TPB on how to study the characteristics of remedies and relate them to the Therapeutic Pocketbook and the MMP. This foreword is reproduced in English in Dimitriadis' TBR.

One main difference I can see is that Hahnemann and Boenninghausen used symptom-combinations to build up characteristics that made them truly unique to a remedy. They did not reduce characteristics down to their lowest common denominator as an essence or a theme.

Chris