This book review is reprinted from The Homoeopath with permission from Francis Treuherz of The Society of Homoeopaths
The Homoeopathic Proving
of Plutonium Nitricum
(including the Toxicology of
Ionising Radiation)
Jeremy Sherr and the
Dynamis School: Malvern,
England, 1999
Paperback,
306 pp, ISBN 1-901147-03-7
Reviewed by Nick Hewes
Back in the distant past (i.e. 1983!), a friend of a friend recounted a story of a visit to Jeremy Sherr's home late one night. Jeremy was working on a case, and as homoeopathic computer programmes hadn't yet been invented, he was repertorising by hand, on paper; he'd chosen large rubrics, and was laboriously copying out remedy after remedy, rubric after rubric, sheet after sheet. His horrified visitor exclaimed, 'You must be mad, writing this all out by hand!'. Jeremy looked up and said, 'if the patient gets better, then it's worth it'.
For those of us who have spent our entire adult lives coming to terms with our own laziness, this story reveals an uncomfortable truth: 'All things are full of labour; Man cannot utter it' [Ecclesiastes chapter 1].
In a similar vein, this recent proving of Plutonium nitricum, produced by Jeremy Sherr, represents another work of Herculean labour. Apparently edited over forty times, it took four years from start to finish, and numbers 306 pages. There are 45 pages in the dream section alone. (Consider that Hahnemann's proving of Arsenicum album, eulogised by George Vithoulkas as 'one of the classic landmarks in homoeopathic literature... so exemplary of the phenomenal detail and thoroughness which is brought to all his work...', occupied a mere 51 pages!)
One of the very difficulties of this work is its sheer size. I've just spent the last three days of the dying century, on my sofa, attempting to digest the book; I feel like a snake that's eaten a very large goat! But, according to Nick Churchill, you simply can't appreciate the Dynamis provings (there were twenty two of them at the last count) by superficially scanning them - you have to go for total immersion. As an example from my own experience, I've often dipped my toes into the dark waters of the Germanium proving, but have never succeeded in understanding the remedy, and have therefore never given it curatively. In order to absorb these works, one needs prolonged and intense exposure to the material.
In order to make our task of assimilation easier, however, Jeremy has included a number of 'leopard-skin accessories'; sections which aren't actually part of the proving, but which aid our understanding of Plutonium. For example, on page three he draws an analogy between fissile radiation, and 'the way society is decaying as we experience the breakdown of the nuclear family... Super-nations decaying at the seams'. There is a detailed history of the birth of plutonium, and its physical properties.
On page nine there is a discussion of the seventh period of the periodic table, which draws a parallel with Scholten's ideas on the realm of radioactivity as 'hidden, unseen and secretive, yet immensely powerful... it belongs to the deep subconscious'. On pages twelve and thirteen there is a table which chronicles our last appalling century, drawing analogies between the discovery of nuclear fission and the barbaric wasting of millions of innocent lives. (The only glaring omission is the discovery of autism as a completely new syndrome in 1943 by Leo Kanner, at exactly the same time as plutonium was being, literally, invented).
There are paragraphs on the role of Pluto in both mythology and astrology, and a wonderful poem by Allen Ginsberg on plutonium:
'Radioactive Nemesis were you there at the beginning/ Black Dumb tongueless unsmelling blast of Disillusion?'
On page 22 there is a discussion of the 'Themes of Plutonium', where Jeremy summarises broad aspects which have emerged from the proving and through cured cases. These are all luxuries which were not afforded to the earlier provings, such as Scorpion or Hydrogen (at least, not to the same extent). If they enable us to perceive and to prescribe the remedy more often when it's needed, then they represent an improvement on those excellent but austere texts. They give a human face to the pure source material of the proving itself, and bring out the depth and violence of the remedy state.
The proving is followed by an extensive repertory list. My only criticism of the book would be levelled at this section (which seems a little unfair, since I know what a hellishly painstaking task it is to translate a proving into repertory language). It could be said that the repertory list has a surfeit of new rubrics, whilst in some cases omitting rubrics which already exist. For example on page 49, prover 6 writes: 'I feel isolated and alone', whilst on page 42, prover 11 asks, 'Am I the only person on this planet?' If I had a patient saying these things, I would look at 'Delusions she is alone in the world'. Yet this rubric isn't included in the repertory of Plutonium; only Forsaken feeling, isolation, sensation of' is. This is odd, when one considers that in the delusions section alone the remedy has been given 39 new rubrics, a fact which will make the next Synthesis even heavier than it is already.
Another example is on page 48: 'Locked and bolted the house, I feel scared... Delusion that people are about to burst through the door'. Surely this is a candidate for rubrics like 'Delusions someone was coming in at the door', or perhaps 'Fear, enemies, of', or Delusions surrounded by enemies'; or even 'Fear when door is opened', and yet none of these rubrics are included in the repertory list. This is a shame, as these rubrics do express something of the fearful darkness that is peculiar to Plutonium. Instead, a new rubric has been created, 'Delusions breaking in, someone is breaking in'.
Which brings us back to proving itself: take this item, from prover 11, page 75:
'Dream of a huge underground cavity where there was a double-headed bat with three wings. I was crossing a stream to revive the dead... there was no ferryman, so I waded safely across. There was a large dog with multiple heads'. This is such an amazing symptom; the place, of course, is Hades, the river is the Styx, the dog is Cerberus, guardian of the underworld, whose master is... Pluto! Remember that the proving was triple-blind that prover 11 had no idea of what substance she'd been given. The fact that an element, invented in 1943, can generate scenes straight out of Dante's Inferno is quite simply mind-blowing and truly illustrates that 'the spirit of the remedy invades the centre of our being' (Sherr, Dynamics and Methodology of Homoeopathic Provings, page 11).
The dream of Hades brings out two essential aspects of Plutonium; firstly, it is that of mutation, the cancerous legacy of radioactivity. There are many other images of deformity: 'Human bodies with creature heads'... 'a dragon-octopus'... 'water dogs, with fins and tail'... 'a blackened tree'. This is mirrored in a forty-page section at the back of the book, entitled, 'The Toxicology of Ionising Radiation'; this even has its own repertory, and is really a complete book in itself. It represents Plutonium on the mother tincture level, and thus offers yet another approach to the remedy: 'Calves born with no eyeballs ... with two tails ... with five legs, two heads, four eyes, no skin, jellylike flesh'. All these are from the toxicological repertory, each one traced to its source, whether it be Chernobyl or Three-Mile Island.
Secondly, the dream of Hades reveals the 'heart of darkness' of Plutonium, a descent, in every meaning of that word, into the lower realms. We see this descent especially on the physical level: 'A sensation as if my middle is dropping down'... 'a buzzing going down to the pubic area'. There is a definite accent on the lower chakras: 'An overpowering sexual feeling', 'Dream that my penis was a foot-and-a-half long, and the head was chunky and cloven, like the Devil's foot'. In all, there are thirty dreams of a purely sexual nature, most of them dark and unpleasant. Six of these dreams are specifically about sexual abuse; e.g. 'A horrible dream of my father trying to abuse me'.
The idea of the underworld is continued as we look into the depths of the past, as through a glass, darkly; provers talk of, 'Flying over many past lives'... 'a dream of my oldest memory'... 'of dead people'. Prover 11 again: 'I feel that the proving is dissolving the sins of the fathers'. One feels that the remedy is able to access ancient memories, not just in personal terms, but in a racial, genetic sense: 'I am very aware of my short hair and skull, and of the soles of my feet, which have a velvety feeling'... 'as if fur or hair on my skin was touched'... 'a vision of the face of a stone-age man; I feel ape-like in my brow, forehead, jaw and mouth ... as if my brow is greatly enlarged' (prover 11 again, she gets all the best lines!). 'My legs are male, hairy and thrust forward... my supervisor is a gibbon, he is trying to defend his territory... I want to eat with my hands, eat raw meat... I am walking like a Neolithic man, or someone from another planet'.
These Neolithic memories take us back to the original dark place - maybe 240,000 years ago (the time it takes plutonium to become inert), when one of our hairy ancestors took up a jaw-bone and smashed in the skull of his neighbour perhaps on that day the 'sins of the fathers' began.
Incidentally, the night before I started to read this tome, I went to Blockbuster in search of The Shining in order to scare the kids; that movie was out on hire, so I chose 2001: A Space Odyssey. This was very fortunate, because it is possibly the film of Plutonium. 2001 makes a direct connection between that first marrow-splitting crash of bone upon bone, and the toxic restlessness of our own nuclear age. If The Shining reveals Stramonium (or was it Camphor?), then 2001 is definitely a proving of Plutonium, and as such is essential viewing!
This is a remedy that we will all have to get to understand and to prescribe in the near future, in much the same way that Stramonium suddenly turned itself into an indispensable constitutional remedy in 1986, the year that Chernobyl blew its lid off. Now prepare for the real thing! It's hard work, but remember, one cure makes it all worthwhile.
The Homeopath
Winter 2000, Number 76