No apology is needed for the birth of this little Monograph; the appalling mortality among pneumonia patients attests the demand for just such a one.

It has been stated, and we have every reason to believe truly, that fully 80% of all pneumonia cases would get well without any medical interference whatever, under proper nursing, so that any system or method of medical healing that cannot lower the death rate to less than 20% would seem rather a menace than a blessing to pneumonia patients.

After treating 242 cases of pneumonia, of ALL types and degrees of severity, some coming directly from and others having been confirmed in the diagnosis by allopaths, with but 3 deaths, a rate of but 1.4%, we can hardly understand a fixed minimum death rate of 25% much less a maximum rate of 95%, in a disease as readily amenable to the proper remedy as is pneumonia.
The death rate under the homeopathic similimum should at no time exceed 5%, a higher rate would rather reflect on our ability.

It is with the hope of aiding the physician to find the similimum and reduce his death rate that this little Monograph is written.

The Authors.

320 Ontario Street,
Toledo, Ohio. pfa3,1928



Original Introduction by the Pulfords

This little Monograph has been divided into two parts - a Materia Medica and a Repertory.

The Materia Medica embraces the leading remedies that will be required in the greater majority of cases of pneumonia, covering all grades and types; it is divided into sections, as follows:
The first section - REMARKS - aims to give a composite picture of the patient requiring that remedy and the remedy itself, together with other information regarding the remedy and the conditions requiste for its selection; the second section contains all the symptoms found under which they appear and for which the remedy is given first rank, hence they must be characteristic of the remedy under which they are found; the third section embraces all the symptoms for which the remedy is the only one given in the highest degree, hence the leader, and if there is no leader of the first degree, the ones in which the remedy is a leader are given.

The graded Repertory was added to supply whatever symptoms were for various reasons not admitted to the text, to use as a key to the text and to give at a glance the other remedies in the text having the same symptom and their relative values.
In order to keep this Repertory within bounds it had to be confined strictly to the number of remedies in the text.
The only remedies in the Repertory not graded are the ones under - Pneumonia and Pain.
The remedies there given are of the first or highest grade only.
All the remedies there listed were verified and graded by that Master Mind, the late, lamented James Tyler Kent, and are accurate and reliable.

Abbreviations and Signs:
< = Agg., coming, increasing, worse, etc.;
> = Amel., decreasing, better, going, etc.;
a. = after;
b. = before;
d. = during;
agg. = aggravation
amel. = amelioration
alt. = alternate, alternately, alternating, etc.;
ext. = external, externally, extending;
int. = internal, internally;
l. = left;
r. = right;
esp. = especially.
Remedies appearing in brackets in the Repertory, thus [Acon.], indicate that the remedy so appearing is of the highest grade and the only known remedy for that particular symptom.
In all cases the shorter term will be used thus: Sweat for perspiration, limbs for extremities, etc.
This is all done to make the work as full as possible, to cut down the size for convenience in carrying compatible with accuracy, availability and reliability.

Remember that the SIMILIMUM will cut short any disease at any time and will act at once and rarely needs repetition.
If it does need repetition it is NOT the similimum.
The farther away you are from the similimum, the oftener you will have to repeat.
Whenever a disease must run its, or a given course it is a sign that you have at no time had the similimum and that the patient would have been fully as well off, if not better, had he had no medical interference whatever.

We have tried to present each remedy in a manner which we believe will make the selection of the similimum a simpler and easier matter and fix the remedy more firmly in the mind of the prescriber.

DON'T: Get panicky; give too low potencies*; repeat too often; paralyze your patient's heart with digitalis or ease his pains with morphine; try to replace the similimum with a tank of oxygen - they won't work. pfa3,1928

[* We recognize that the modern term for homeopathic remedies is "Homeopathic medicinal products (HMPs)".
To us this new term sounds very awkward and so we decided to continue using the, in our opinion, much more melodic term "remedy".]



Preface by the Editors

The worldwide insecurity regarding the COVID-19-Epidemic starting in March 2020 gave us the idea and the impulse for this publication.
At that time there was little specific and/or effective treatment in conventional medicine available.
The effectiveness and/or harm of tried therapies (such as antipyretics, cortisone, chloroquine, antiviral drugs, controlled mechanical ventilation, etc.) is still in discussion.
Precise scientific studies and analysis will hopefully deliver clear answers regarding the effectiveness, side-effects and other consequences of the applied therapies!

With this scientific publication we intend to summarize the rich homeopathic experience on successful treatment of patients with pneumonia of all kinds and degrees.
The purpose of this work is to enable homeopathic practitioners to treat patients successfully, even in pandemics.
We want to contribute to an appropriate appreciation of the effecitiveness of homeopathic treatment in the therapy of seriously ill patients, also in the context of pandemics or in other life-threatening situations.

During the COVID-19-crisis we had the impression that the wealth of knowledge that homeopathy has accumulated over the last 180 years was not sufficiently available and therefore homeopathic colleagues struggled more than necessary with the treatment of pneumonia patients.
An important reason for this is that the already gathered and documented experience that homeopathy has already built up for more than 180 years to effectively treat such conditions, has not been put together so far.
We saw homeopaths "reinventing the wheel" in terms of case-taking, choice of remedies, posology, case management, and so on.
We believe this is not necessary and hinders progress in professional homeopathic practice.
In the beginning of our work for this publication we did not realize the abundance of valuable information.
More and more we discovered how much literature has been published on this topic and which important aspects for high-quality homeopathic work must be addressed.
By means of broad literature-research we discovered a great amount of valuable data from as far back as 1836 referring to pneumonia (see bibliography).
The great task was to collect, critically filter, and edit the findings, so that homeopaths would be able to use these as effectively as possible.
We put our best efforts towards achieving this goal, and are positive that this publication can support colleagues all over the world.

In the course of our work we recognized that the symptom-pictures and understanding of most homeopathic remedies grew with each author as his own clinical experience advanced and the research became more conscientious and in-depth detailed.
(See for example the remedy-description of Iodum of Kafka kka1 and Pulford pfa3,1928 and then compare to our present collection.)

We are convinced that a wide perspective including all recorded knowledge - old and new - will lead to the best homeopathic practice possible in the 21 st century, especially regarding a disease causing billions of people to suffer and still killing millions of people every year!
Limiting the homeopathic understanding and information to the content of only a few books or just regarding certain aspects (e.g. Materia Medica) leads to poorer results!
For this reason, we also collected and included information on further important features:
1. Homeopathically specific descriptions of pathognomonic symptoms and course of the concerned diseases (lobar-, broncho-pneumonia, pleurisy, etc.).
1. Guidelines for comprehensive homeopathic case-taking in these diseases.
1. Recommendations on posology.
2. Recommendations for homeopathic case management, including oxygen-supplementation.
3. Recommendations on modern tools for helping to decide until which point a case of pneumonia is better treated at home and when it is better to treat under hospital conditions, if possible.

Since scientific work as this publication can and should always be improved, please let us know if you have any supplementary suggestions.

Furthermore, we want to remind the reader and ourselves: Death is an integral part of life.
No form of medicine can prevent it forever.
This is also true for patients with a pneumonia, especially if these patients are of old age and/or suffer from severe chronic diseases.
Sometimes these obvious facts seem to be ignored in medicine.
The death of a patient seems to indicate that somebody has made a mistake, especially the attending physician.
We consider it to be difficult and at the same time important, to assess which patient can be cured and how this can be established best.
In some cases, we find the more important task to be helping the patient to find a good way to die and to abandon the ambition to cure.
The knowledge on best palliative care and treatment is already very voluminous and is waiting to be used! May all of us, who accompany people and offer them our help through their diseases, make the best possible decision of either trying to help to cure or accompanying on the best way to death.

Our intention is that this work will benefit patients and practitioners, as well as homeopathy and medicine in general.
At the end of this journey we are once again overwhelmed how you can cure people, even on the brink of death, with a few globules of homeopathic medicine, if you have learned this skill.

On the question - What do we treat as homeopaths?
We want to emphasize that the homeopathic principle is NOT to treat diseases (such as pneumonia) but diseased individuals.
Thus please take into account:
1) Disease defining signs and (pathognomonic) symptoms
AND
1) Homeopathically individualizing/characteristic modalities, objective signs, subjective or other symptoms (e.g. pneumonia during suppressed skin eruptions, disease progression from one side to the other, etc.), according to the homeopathic law of similars.

At the same time, clinical homeopathic experience of the past 200 years, with an estimated hundred-thousand "pneumonia" or "pleurisy" cases, shows that "individualizing" symptoms with these diagnoses very often develop similar "homeopathically individualizing" symptom-patterns curatively corresponding with the remedy-pictures collected for this book from 1836 until 2024!

(E.g. stitching pains in the chest improved by lying on the painful side - in pneumonia with pleurisy.)

Thus we have come to the conclusion that this "old" knowledge on disease-pictures can be valuable today as well as for times to come.

We want to point out that we do not know if further additional "homeopathically individualizing" symptom-patterns may develop in the future, correlating with age, social circumstances, (chronic) comorbidities, pre-medication, etc.
These patterns might indicate other remedies fitting these new differentiating symptom-pictures.
As homeopaths we should continue to get the accurate picture of every new case of a diseased individual and find the curatively fitting remedies, possibly supported by using homeopathic literature as a source of helpful information.
The book in your hands will likely be a basic reference guide and of valuable service in the future.

We will end our introduction with the following statement by the homeopathic authority A.C. Cowperthwaite, as it corresponds with and illustrates our conception of the homeopathic approach to treating patients with pneumonia, we couldn't have said it better: "It is all right to understand the pathology of pneumonia.
We all ought to do that.
It is all right for the term pneumonia to be a sort of catch word that brings to our mind's eye certain remedies that are most often indicated in that condition.
But homeopathy knows no specifics.
We have no royal road to treatment in pneumonia or any other disease.
It is all right to know the various stages of pneumonia and to associate with each stage certain remedies most often called for in such stage, but that is all.
Bear in mind that there is not a remedy in our whole Materia Medica but that may be indicated in some individual case of pneumonia, and bear in mind that while certain remedies are most often required in certain stages yet, if the symptoms of any one of those remedies should happen to present themselves in any stage of the disease, they would be equally indicated and equally efficious." (THE TREATMENT OF PNEUMONIA/ By A. C. Cowperthwaite, M. D. Ph. D.; Chicago, Journal of Homeopathics. Vol. XLIV. BATAVIA, ILL., APRIL, 1906. No. 4.)

Tom Vogel MD and Martin Wernhart MD
location + Date


Introduction by the Editors

About the Clinical Introduction
Why such a long clinical introduction to this publication? There are several reasons.
First of all, we want to point out to what extent pneumonia and pleurisy are diseases to be taken into account and how dangerous they still are in various regions of the world.
Secondly, we want to compare modern orthodox classification with the homeopathic.
We intentionally use the term "orthodox medicine"* for what is often called "conventional" or "scientific medicine".
We see this form of medicine considered traditional, normal, and accepted by the majority of the population in many parts of the world.
We also appreciate many of orthodox medicine's findings and methods, as can be seen in the extensive reference in this book.
In many parts of the world, this type of medicine is considered to have the highest scientific standards.
Many medical methods (e.g. Ayurveda, Homeopathy, etc.) often do not fit into these specific orthodox scientific models for various reasons.
Still these other medical systems can be very effective, health-promoting and they may help to avoid the usage of strong, possibly expensive medical treatment.
We would very much welcome the expansion of evidence based medicine acknowledging empiric findings of all medical methods at eye-level.
However, as we do not see these methods integrated in scientific research on an equal footing, we consider the term "conventional medicine" discriminatory.

Footnote (on the same page, please) -
*With reference to the term "orthodox" in religions, we choose this term because of the similar hierarchical-dogmatic thinking often applied to medicine.
Sadly we also see many homeopathic practitioners believing their method to be the only scientific way.
We plead for a scientific medicine integrating all medical methods considering their specific methodology!

The third reason: We wanted to summarize the extensive knowledge of pathognomonic symptoms and course of the described diseases in order to help the homeopathic prescriber to distinguish those symptoms from homeopathic characteristic ones.
Medical scientific knowledge and understanding has lately greatly advanced regarding relevant aspects of anatomy, physiology, and pathology.
We therefore found it helpful to summarize important features on these aspects as well, in a condensed form.
In writing this book we also learned a lot about which aspects of the given case need to be actively explored, observed or investigated in order to receive a clear homeopathic picture of the sick person and the relevant information for further (modern) diagnostics, treatment, and prognosis.
Pneumonia is a potentially life-threatening disease.
Therefore, we found it was necessary to have the best data and tools available to decide when and how a patient can and should be treated at home or in hospital.

We were amazed how much information there is on the topic of posology in pneumonia-treatment.
Maybe our collection can also be helpful for other clinical topics, especially for other severe acute conditions.

We would be happy if this book became a benchmark for clinical homeopathic textbooks in the 21st century.
We intend to achieve this goal by integrating the valuable experience of the past 200 years around the globe in a conclusive and transparent way as well as by supplementing the other scientific knowledge of today.

We believe that homeopathic science and art needs conclusive AND critical evaluation as well as integration of past insights.
This also includes answering open questions (e.g. on posology, etc.) with the tools available today.
We also consider it necessary to integrate the latest state of the art homeopathic knowledge into medical science in general.
We believe that the time when students and practitioners where willing to trawl through books and journals from the 19th century to gain answers for today's practice will soon be over.
For this reason we want to collect and learn from the best insights of the past and proceed to a prolific homeopathic future.
We would be delighted if more homeopaths worked through further clinical fields and diagnoses (e.g. tuberculosis, malaria, etc.).
If you would like advice or want to exchange thoughts on this process, please contact us!

We consider different schools of medicine such as homeopathy, orthodox western medicine, ayurveda, and many others as sisters and brothers - up to now far too often in dispute and rivalry with each other and often without benefit for the sick.
Our dream is that we all research, learn and work together in appreciation of the qualities of the others' methods and skills to achieve sustainable health for individuals, communities, countries and the entire world.

Background to the Materia Medica
We left Pulfords' presentation of the Materia Medica "untouched" in this publication, as it seems very thoughtfully worked out in its form and extent.
Pulford decided to restrict the information in his Materia Medica-section to details he found specifically characteristic.
Pulford integrated further symptoms for a given remedy in the repertory.
The first author we supplemented was Douglas Borland bl4,1939 .
He developed a very comprehensive image of each remedy viewed from different angles and with different focuses.
Therefore, we also included some information from Borland that has already been mentioned by Pulford, in order to maintain the picture Borland had drawn.
From other authors (see Bibliography) we only included information that had not been mentioned by the above authors, as none provided such comprehensive pictures as Pulford or Borland.
From these others we only included information that has been clearly mentioned to be found useful for the treatment of pneumonia plus pleurisy, excluding data on other related diseases (e.g. whooping-cough, asthma, tuberculosis, etc.) or constitutional treatment in general.
We tried to integrate this additional information for effective study of remedies enabling the work with patients.
Some quoted information we inserted in text-passages in square brackets, the rest was given extra-space below our primarily cited two authors.
The only exception of our rule to only integrate Materia Medica information clearly stated for pneumonia and/or pleurisy is the Materia Medica in the context of Atypical Pneumonia/Sycotic Tuberculosis.
Many remedies in this rubric from Kent's repertory could not be found clearly stated for this disease-context.
Therefore we put together information that appeared relevant to us for this context.
Further clinical experience with this information is needed to confirm or falsify it!

In Borland's text we put the according topic (e.g. chestpain or fever) in bold letters.
Names of other remedies mentioned for differential diagnosis or as following remedies in a given case, we set bold and in italics (e.g. Acon.) throughout the Materia Medica.
This was done to facilitate working with this book.

We are aware of the fact that various authorities (e.g. Constantine Hering, Abdur Rehman, etc.) cited by others question the reliability of the mentioned information.
For future publications we will favor first-hand information on cured cases.
None the less we believe that the authorities we cited worked with a high sense of accuracy in choosing their information.
Furthermore, we recognized that various sources (e.g. Clarke c1) gave only little information treating pneumonia specifically.
These practitioners formed their descriptions of the specifics of remedies without differentiating the clinical context, which would or might have been helpful.

In order not to overcrowd our text we only integrated information in which the context with pneumonia and/or pleurisy was pointed out explicitly.
If other characteristic signs or symptoms show up in an actual case, feel free to search in other clinical sources (e.g. repertories, etc.).

We also added and edited information on remedies to compare with follow-up remedies, etc. from various sources.
Many authorities underlined the importance of knowing these connections in treating patients with pneumonia as well as for other diseases.

About the Repertory
Drs. Pulford, as mentioned in their introduction, based their repertory on their selection of rubrics and remedy-entries from Kent's repertory k but they restricted their rubrics and the entries in the rubrics to the 25 remedies they had described extensively in their book.
The Pulfords also integrated symptoms in their repertory which were not mentioned in the Materia Medica-text.
We rearranged the content of this repertory corresponding with the form of modern repertories (Complete repertory, Synthesis).
For example "desires" and "aversions" to food, mentioned in the chapter "Stomach" in the original, were transferred to the chapter "Generals" as commonly used nowadays.
Nevertheless, we left a cross-reference for every rubric in its original place.
We also researched whether the name of a given rubric is the same under which this rubric can be found in Complete Repertory and, when necessary, added the contemporary term.
Thus the repertory is now presented in modern order with present day keywords.

For the 122 remedies we complemented all the not yet provided information within the Materia Medica on a given remedy and introduced this information in the corresponding rubrics marked with their source-code.
So we added every entry in the repertory to the original work with a source-code, every rubric or entry without a source-code is part of Pulfords' original.
After long discussions we decided to add Materia Medica information only when it was clearly associated with pneumonia and/or pleurisy.
So the Materia Medica of Pulfords' book is fully integrated in our repertory.
If you find an important symptom in your case at hand which has no rubric in our repertory feel free to look it up elsewhere.
We compared Pulfords' rubrics and repertory-entries with Complete Repertory zanx and Synthesis Repertory srox and complemented rubrics and only the remedies described in this book, always after having verified the source - when it seemed to fit, we annotated the source-code.
If we could not find repertory-entries from others within the given source, we presented them crossed-out (e.g. Pyrog. hr1 - means this entry for Pyrog. from Synthesis could not be found in Herings' Guiding Symptoms hr1).
Repertory-entries that only gave a name of the author but no clear source of the information we inserted in brackets (e.g. (Bapt.).
This means this entry for Bapt. is referred to Constantin Hering without any hint at which book/article this would be mentioned in).
We supplemented "smaller remedies for pneumonia" only in the specific rubrics given in the Materia-Medica-section.
We did this in order not to distort repertorial analysis with adding seldomly fitting remedies.
So if you have highly characteristic and specific symptoms for "smaller remedies" in a case, check them in the Materia Medica first, as these remedies are certainly underrepresented in the repertory and therefore easily lost.

The last step we took was to analyze about 500 homeopathic case-reports we found in homeopathic literature, to make sure all mentioned symptoms were covered.
The symptoms that were not yet integrated at this point, we supplemented with the source-code "hpp1" (see Bibliography).
We look forward to receiving further homeopathically solved cases in order to integrate further symptoms in the repertory and Materia Medica.
So in case you have solved cases, please send your documentation to us and we will publish it for the homeopathic community! For every tool needs practice in order to be used in a professional way!
Our aim was to create a concise and yet precise tool for effective treatment of patients with pneumonia or pleurisy.
Successful work with this tool needs training.
For this we recommend using this publication by studying the Materia Medica and repertory, as well as solving paper-cases.
Then it's time to start using all this knowledge for treating actual patients.
If you lack paper-cases on pneumonia,we have collected about 500 cases from various sources.
Contact us if you are interested.
Contact - ordination@drvogel.at