Title: Reptiles
Publisher: Saltire Books Ltd
Hardcover, 680 pages.
ISBN:978-1-908127-35-8
Reviewer: Dr. Joe Rozencwajg
This is a Materia Medica of the reptilians, including crocodilians, three dinosaurs, lizards, the multiple families of snakes, turtles and worm lizards.
But it is not an ordinary Materia Medica. My plan was to read the generalities and commonalities of the different families, then sample a reptile here and there. That was impossible. From the first few paragraphs, I was totally sucked into this world of often scary and deadly animals, I had to read absolutely everything, every word, every sentence, about each of them.
Frans does not simply write a homeopathic Materia Medica based on provings and clinical experiences; he goes into the minute details of the life of each animal, its biology, sociology, behaviour, sex life, venoms, aggressivity, birth to death; but wait, there is more: the myths and legends around every animal, from populations around the world, their relationship with humans, the effects of their bites, obviously, with clinical cases, but also of their mere presence or invocation of their name, their worship and the fear and hatred they inspire.
Only after that, when it exists, are we offered a Homeopathic Materia Medica with rubrics as found in the major computer programmes and published by their authors, many of them not yet included in those programmes we use daily.
That is where I see a “problem”: I was frustrated for example that the well-spoken about Komodo Dragon has no proving and probably no potentisation. I recognised the behaviour of some patients in snakes without a remedy available and without a real proving done or even a clinical empirical trial.
Sneaky Frans… the best way to push us into doing those provings and using little known reptilians when the “classical” ones appear high in repertorisation but do not have the desired effect: investigate the family and use the neglected little cousin that is the spitting image of the case (pun intended).
I really would like to see a specific repertory created, based on all the traits described, maybe with a different font or colour when there is a proving or not. That is what I said years ago when I reviewed Monera, then Fungi.
I am still waiting for it. Indeed, the drawback of this book is exactly this: it would take a very long time to read a whole family or sub-family of reptilians when its main representative in homeopathy does not appear to be working as we thought it would and should. Don’t even dream about memorising its content!
The trend today in Homeopathy is to study remedies within their biological family; it makes sense. This book is the one for the reptiles. Not that other’s (Farokh Master, Sankaran…) are not good, but after tasting this one, they feel incomplete, even if Frans’ work is often based on them. I only regret the very frequent use of our archenemy, Wikipedia, as a reference.
Read it. It is homeopathy, it is biology, it is human behaviour, it is also a thriller.
