Philosophy, diagnostic classification, clinical tips, miasmatic repertory, miasmatic weightage of medicines and case illustrations.
From the back cover: Dr Subrata Kumar Baneijea was born in Calcutta. India in 1957, the fourth generation of a distinguished and widely respected homeopathic family. He graduated in Homeopathy from the University of Calcutta with a record number of honours passes in nine medical subjects and with five gold medals to his name, setting himself on a path to become an internationally acclaimed homeopathic clinician, lecturer and author. He is now acknowledged to be the world's leading authority on miasmatic prescribing.
Dr Banerjea is an Honoured Fellow of several academies; Director and Principle Lecturer of the Bengal Allen Medical Institute. Calcutta; Principal and Chief Lecturer of Materia Medica and Clinical Therapeutics at the Allen College of Homeopathy, Essex, England. When he is not lecturing, he divides he divides his time between his clinical practices in the UK and in India where he also acts as Clinical Consultant in various rural and slum clinics. Despite this hectic international scheduling, Dr Banerjea together with his brother Joy and his partner Janet Robinson, plays an active role in the Kamala Banerjee Fund, a charity which distributes milk to the poor children of Calcutta. Students of Dr Banerjea will testify to the remarkable knowledge and enthusiasm which he generously imparts to all who share his passion for this most rational of healing arts. His dedication to the truth of homeopathy is regarded as inspiring and unsurpassed.
Reprinted with the permission of The Society of Homeopaths (from "The Homeopath magazine April 2003 edition). Reviewed by Stewart Sandison.
These are exciting times for homeopathy: - sometimes a mere glimpse of the contents page of The Homeopath, for example, is enough to make the innocent reader dizzy with the possibilities! We read about the teachings of so many distinguished and gifted homeopaths, each one with a different method of practice. Some are using the periodic table and its groupings, others attempt to sort remedies into family groups of animal, vegetable or mineral. The drive to organise remedies into families and groups is of course facilitated by computers, with their vast command of information. The simple aim of all this labour is that our understanding is, hopefully, increased, so that we are better able to eventually 'find that remedy'. But of course the very first homeopathic 'family' is the theory of miasms -comprising Hahnemann's original trinity of psora, sycosis and syphilis, (plus, if you prefer, the optional extra of the tubercular miasm).
On this subject Dr Subrata Banerjea has produced Miasmatic Prescribing, which may come as a relief to the overwhelmed homoeopath, based as it is on the apparently more solid ground of classical homoeopathy. In a way it has actually been written by a family, as Dr. Banerjea represents the fourth generation to practise homoeopathy in his ancestral line. The book is a distillation of the wisdom and experience of those four generations. There is even a chapter charmingly entitled Ancestral Tips.
The work has been 15 years in the writing and comes from both a study of classical authors, and also from clinical experience in India and England. It has the certainty that those credentials bring. The author feels that now, more than ever, we need to incorporate miasmatic thinking into our analysis and prescriptions, in order to overcome the "suppression and contamination" found in the over-medicated and stressed people who come to see us. This is because these factors bring about "one-sided cases" or cases with a scarcity of symptoms.
Miasmatic prescribing is large-sized to accomodate the comparative charts and tables that make up the bulk of the text,so the good news is that the philosophy chapter is only 39 pages of the 270. There are six parts to the book, and each one is set out in headed sections, with the idea of facilitating a miasmatic analysis of your cases. The philosophy comes first, as it should; it is a summary of the Banerjea thinking on miasms, based on Hahnemann (with quotations from Kent and other classical authors), and upon Dr Banerjea's vast familial clinical experience. Parts two and three comprise diagnostic charts comparing various symptoms in a miasmatic way, with general observations and specific repertory-order symptoms. Part four is entitled Miasmatic Ancestral Tips: - here we are given pearls of wisdom from the Banerjeas, in the form of comparative tables on subjects from jogging to AIDS (four pages alone). Part five is a miasmatic repertory, with ticked boxes for each symptom under the four miasmatic headings, plus an extra box if the symptom denotes a mixing of the miasms. This is limited by space, of course, but could be very useful in its own right. Part six is a table showing the miasmatic weighting of remedies. It uses a grading system from zero to three, and it covers more than 400 remedies.
There is a truly excellent contents section detailing every single sub-heading; also, an index, which shows that the book is intended as a reference work. As such it is a valuable addition to our literature. The lotus flower on the cover is a symbol of the Banerjea approach to miasmatic treatment. You may not be able to see it on the illustration above, but the central petals represent syphilis, tuberculosis and sycosis. Sycosis has two petals:- a nice touch, I thought.
The author's system of prescribing is to ascertain the 'surface' or uppermost miasm in the case, and take this chiefly into account, whilst paying attention to the totality of symptoms, the 'essence' of the patient, and the keynotes (including strange, rare and peculiar symptoms). After this first miasmatic treatment, the next "layer of miasm" will reveal itself, and should then be prescribed upon, and so on. "There is a definite sequence to the layers as they present". This reminded me of Richard Brautigan's prose-poetry: - "Like peeling an onion into a smaller and smaller circle with tears growing in my eyes until the onion is no more, all peeled away and I stop crying". Would it not be a fine thing if our chosen remedy helped our patients to cry (aggravation) and then to stop crying (cure)? A seductive model, this idea of layers.
Dr Banerjea says that this is "the most important contribution of Hahnemann's explorations into miasms -the concept that layers of predisposition exist". My explorations, though, find that Hahnemann and Kent actually say very little about the concept of layers. If, as we are told, Hahnemann 'opened' all his later cases with Sulphur, then he must have been going for the very jugular of psora. Any mention of treating miasms in a routine order seems only to refer to cases of active sycotic or syphilitic infection. In these instances, specific remedies were employed. This would then be followed by anti-psoric treatment.
In Kent's lecture on the 'Second Prescription', he says "the plan of treatment consists in assuming that the case is a psoric one". (It is interesting that Hahnemann and Kent seem to have adopted different - opposite in fact - systems in these cases). Sometimes after anti-psoric treatment the patient comes back with the "Syphilitic state and appearance". Kent then elicits the fact, not mentioned previously, that the patient has had syphilis, but was "cured" with mercury (that is, allopathically). "This indicates a second prescription." Once again, this concerns an infection in the lifetime of the patient, not an inherited, latent, miasmatic state. In the lecture on sycosis, Kent says something similar about treating sycosis and syphilis.
The systematic treatment of "layers of miasms", then, must be a method developed by four generations of Banerjeas, and could well be a valid model for the 21st century in its "Mixed Up Confusion" (apologies to Dylan!). Certainly if you are not content in your practice with what Hahnemann calls only "pretty good success" this book might bring what you seek, or cause you to rethink your personal method. It may remind you to take the miasms into account more seriously in your casework, or conversly, it may give you more confidence in your own method, even if it's light on miasmatic thinking. Simply as a reference tool Miasmatic Prescribing deserves a place on the serious homeopath's shelf.
