For the practitioner who wants to read a remedy’s source beside its symptoms: what the substance is, how it behaves, where it sits in history and myth, and then the proving and clinical picture.
Prisma, by Frans Vermeulen, is an expanded version of his Synoptic Materia Medica 1 and covers the same remedies. His introduction argues for using what the natural sciences now know about a substance when building a drug picture, and returns to the doctrine of signatures, citing Hering and Clarke. Each remedy entry has four parts:
- An opening quip or quotation, from the grave to the light-hearted.
- Signs: a documented summary of what is known about the source substance, gathered from every available source and ranging from zoology and chemistry to folklore, mythology and history.
- Main Symptoms: an enlarged, revised take on the Leading Symptoms of Synoptic Materia Medica 1. A bullet marks each quotation, among them exact proving phrasing, clinical symptoms and fragments of cases.
- Rubrics: taken from Synthesis.
Vermeulen also went back through the proving reports collected in Hughes and Dake’s Cyclopaedia of Drug Pathogenesy and added or corrected symptoms he judged overlooked or misread. References are given for the additions, and an addition without a reference is his own.
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