Clinically Verified Materia Medica Vol 1

What began as a simple update to Dr. Morrison’s Desktop Guide evolved into something far more profound. During the process, Dr. Morrison drew from an extensive archive of cured cases—gathered over three decades from journals, seminars, personal cases, and those of colleagues—collected alongside his wife, Nancy Herrick.

Initially, these cases served to verify and refine his understanding of the remedies. However, as the project progressed, Dr. Morrison shifted his approach: rather than relying on theory, he focused exclusively on what the cured cases revealed.

 

 The result is a Materia Medica built entirely on verified, cured symptoms—offering the most accurate, comprehensive, and dynamic portrait of each remedy available today.

 

This groundbreaking work is now presented in Clinically Verified Materia Medica

A word from Dr. Morrison on bringing Clinically Verified Materia Medica to life: 

“I began work on this book in 2010 when I realized my original Desktop Guide was in need of

an update. This was mainly because of the availability of many new Materia Medicas, new

case books, new provings of new remedies, new work on the periodic table, plant families

and countless other innovations and creative work in the field of homeopathy. I felt a need to

synthesize as best I could, all of that new information. Also, for my own edification, I wanted

to study in detail all of these advances to help me in my own practice. By doing so, I hoped

to make my Desktop Guide more useful to the profession. Little did I realize where such an

endeavor would lead me.

 

This book, Clinically Verified Materia Medica, includes extensive additions and insights (and

even some subtractions) into each remedy picture. This information came only in small part

from my own cases and over 40 years of homeopathic practice, but mainly from intensive

study of thousands of cured cases from hundreds of homeopaths all over the world. I was put

in a position to construct this text by two strokes of sheer luck.

The first stroke of luck was in my education, for in this, I have been the most fortunate

of homeopaths. I have had unparelleled opportunity of prolonged and intimate study with

two of the greatest homeopaths of our age: First with George Vithoulkas and later with Rajan

Sankaran. This background gave me a breadth of understanding of remedies, of patients

and of case analysis. In short, it helped me to be able to see these thousands of cured cases

objectively and deeply.

 

The second stroke of luck was to have married my divinely inspired wife and partner,

Nancy Herrick. In the early 1980s, Nancy began collecting and filing cured cases for every

remedy and eventually convinced me to do the same. She collected cases from every journal,

seminar, conference, co-worker, colleague, from our own students and our own practices. We

also found every book available with large numbers of cases from authors all over the world

and scoured e-journals.

 

By the time I began working on this text, our files were filled with almost 10,000 cured

and solid cases – mainly cured by one remedy alone. The fact that these cases came from

a huge number of different authors and different approaches to case analysis was in the

long run one of the most important sources of strength in this book. Any one prescriber

can develop a skewed view of the remedy, but when the work of hundreds of prescribers is

combined, we have a more reliable set of data.

At the beginning of what I thought was an update of my existing book, I used the cured

case files rather casually. After all, I was going to write what I “knew” about the remedy more

or less regardless of what was in the cured cases. After I had written a remedy chapter, I read

through some of the cases to see how my chapter and the cured cases aligned. The work was

my best effort but there was something missing – missing because I had yet to understand the

meaning and power of the cured cases.

 

It took some years of work before the value of the cured cases dawned on me – before I

began to take this resource seriously. What I discovered in these cured cases was a startling

congruence of information – patients from completely independent authors used the exact

same words to describe themselves and their pathology. Eventually the evidence of my own

eyes made me take stock and realize I was sitting on a goldmine of information – a goldmine

that could help clarify what was most useful from the many new ideas and sometimes

contradictory images of remedies – a goldmine that could help us find a path to truth.

As I spent more and more time on the cured cases while writing, one day I thought, “What

if these cured cases are not just meant to assist in my writing about this remedy, what if they

are more important than anything I am writing? What if these cases are The Remedy itself?”

In that very moment I decided to shift to writing only what was found in the cases, exactly as

ithe information was presented, ignoring everything I thought I knew or had been told about

the remedy. In essence, I decided to let the cured cases speak for themselves – to let myself be

the instrument for their silent voices. The result was remedy chapters that were more direct

and precise, without ambiguity, exaggeration or conjecture.

This meant that I had to restart the book, scrapping some years of previous effort in the

process. I rewrote all of the remedy chapters from this new perspective and eventually

found my new role to be more like a reporter or translator than an author. The cured cases

thus became the actual author of the book, and I was merely the scribe or the interpreter.

Therefore, since this would be an entirely different book than the Desktop Guide, I decided to

entitle this new book, Clinically Verified Materia Medica.

I see this book as an effort at clarification of the Materia Medica as well as adding to

it. Using cured cases gives us a reality check. Without such cross-referencing and reality-

checking methods, homeopathy can become an elaborate echo chamber. The risk is that

each new author repeats the same truths and mistakes, reinforcing both the good and the

misleading and ceasing forward movement altogether. But a reporter or translator has a

sacred task to be as faithful and accurate as possible to his sources. In this case, my source was

the work of the entire homeopathic community – the best case work published or spoken.

Homeopathy is an evolving science. We homeopaths have been flexible. We adopted

remedies from the allopaths, herbalists, native healers, wise women and basically anywhere

we found them. In most (but far from all) instances, someone then performed a proving of

the remedy, but how do we make progress from here?

Provings are the first step in unlocking the inner story of the our remedies. Once we have

a proving, the next step is to cure somebody with the remedy. This takes the remedy from the

realm of theory to reality. The cured cases eventually surpass the proving and show which

proving symptoms were most reliable. They also put the proving symptoms into context.

After enough cases are cured, we can begin to consolidate a picture of the remedy.

Brilliant minds often see deeply into the patients who were deeply cured (Kent, Phatak,

Vithoulkas, Sankaran). This gives us the “Essence” or “Genius” images that have helped

homeopaths for two centuries. Our current creative minds have then gone further – developing

knowledge about groups of remedies (the periodic table, the plant and animal families,

sarcodes, etc.). So while the proving is the first step, the cured cases give us the “final court of

arbitration.” This current book is intended to document this final form of information.

I feel an intense responsibility in writing this book to get to the heart of the cases, to state

the results as clearly and simply as possible and to put the information in a form that is pleasing

to the eye and easy to reference. My whole purpose in writing this textbook is to give you, my

cherished colleagues and students of our beloved homeopathy, a tool which you richly deserve.

I truly hope and believe this book will help you find remedies for your patients, will help you

with your decision-making in practice and will give you more certainty and confidence in your

prescriptions. May it be a companion to you on this often difficult path.

With love and respect and tenderness to all homeopaths everywhere,

—Roger “