Animal Mind, Human Voices

From the Book

This book is a compilation of Nancy Herrick's recent provings of eight new animal remedies (Milk of Lion, Wolf, Horse, Elephant, Dolphin, Rat blood, Maiasaura bone, Butterfly).

"There is a moment where homeopathy becomes something much greater - a reflection of the mystery of life. Nancy Herrick has skillfully, amazingly captured that moment in her provings. I believe that her work represents the cutting edge of homeopathy."
David Kent Warkentin, PA
creator of MacRepertory
Reference Works, and Zizia

"Homeopathy as a living science must respond to the changing circumstances of life, to the changes in human awareness and understanding.

"We are beginning to remember, to reenter the realm where human suffering is experienced as the suffering of nature, of the plants and of the animals, of the world of which we are but a small part.

"Nancy Herrick's remarkable book, in which feeling and thought are so beautifully woven together, both illuminates the path ahead for our science and contains practical information which will result in the true healing of many, many individuals."
Jonathan Shore MD, DHt, MFHom
co-founder Hahnemann College of Homeopathy
and Hahnemann Medical Clinic

"Nancy Herrick, a pioneer in the field of provings, is breathing new life and vitality into homeopathy. This book is a wonderful contribution to the ever-expanding body of homeopathic knowledge."
Judith Reichenberg-Ullman ND, DHANP
co-author of Ritalin-Free Kids
Homeopathic Self-Care

"Nancy Herrick's provings, elegantly conceived and presented in a manner which is both accessible and thorough, will be valued for years to come by every serious homeopath."
Deborah Gordon MD

"Animal Mind, Human Voices, by Nancy Herrick is a major contribution to understanding the 'energetic message' in these important new animal remedies."
Kenneth R. Pelletier PhD, MD (hc)
author of Sound Mind, Sound Body

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Details

Animal Mind, Human Voices, Provings of Eight New Animal Remedies, by Nancy Herrick, was published in 1988.

This book is a record of Nancy Herrick's recent provings of eight new animal remedies-Milk of Lion, Milk of Wolf, Milk of Horse, Milk of Elephant, Milk of Dolphin, Rat blood, Maiasaura bone (fossilized), Butterfly (whole insect).

Each proving is presented in an identical format. The animal is described, and then a brief description of how the substance was obtained and which pharmacy prepared it, although not how it was done.

Then the themes are given with paragraphs from the provers' journals. Next is a listing of rubrics as they might fit into a repertory, and finally the provers' journals (but only for the first three weeks). Some symptoms were added to each remedy's picture only after group discussion took place.

Herrick presents much information from the perspective of the 'new homeopathy'. Anthropomorphic speculations and archetypal themes are emphasized in the description of these remedies.

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Author

Nancy Herrick, MA, PA

(1947 -     )

Nancy Herrick was born on December 13, 1947 in the USA. She was one of the members of the now historic Bay Area Homeopathic Study Group. She had her first job in health care at the Bay Area Women's Health Collective. At the Hering Family Health Clinic in 1974, Ms. Herrick began her 27 years as a homeopath.

In 1985, she was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the Hahnemann Medical Clinic and the Hahnemann College of Homeopathy. Her main homeopathic teachers have been George Vithoulkas and Rajan Sankaran.

Ms. Herrick is a widely respected homeopath and homeopathic educator. She began her extensive career as a lecturer in 1983 with the International Foundation for Homeopathy. Since that time she has lectured throughout Europe, America, Australia, New Zealand and India. She has published widely both in the United States and abroad.

For the past five years, Ms. Herrick has been extensively involved in research developing new homeopathic medications including Lac Equinum, Lac Delphinum and Rosa Gallicia as well as fifteen other remedies. She has published eight of these studies in her book Animal Mind, Human Voices.

Ms. Herrick and Hahnemann College now offer a comprehensive introduction to classical homeopathy in video for home study. The program, Foundations of Homeopathy consists of actual live video taped lectures from the Hahnemann College of Homeopathy four year professional course for licensed medical practitioners.

Learn more about the Foundations of Homeopathy video course.

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Reviews

Two Reviews:
1. LINKS
2. HOMEOPATHY TODAY


LINKS
Reviewed by Deborah Gordon USA

Amidst the great diversity of life and substances on this planet we call home, homoeopaths have long noted that there is a dearth of remedies from the animal Kingdom. A few snakes, a few insects, and a smattering of extracts of larger animals, have provided woefully inadequate representation of the breadth of life within the animal kingdom.

Nancy Herrick has ventured further into this domain with insightful, provocative provings, presented in a comprehensive and accessible manner in her book, Animal Minds Human Voices.

She chronicles and summarises the provings of eight new remedies made from animal substances: a whole butterfly, blood of a rat, the bone of a dinosaur, and the milk of horse, elephant, wolf, dolphin and lion. The book is enjoyable to read and will be valuable to all practising homoeopaths.

Within each remedy chapter there are four separate sections. She first describes the animal itself and the specific information on the substance which was proved. Secondly she summarises the themes of the proving, elaborated with excerpts from provers' journals.

The journals are included in their entirety as well as the carefully selected or created rubrics. Thus, within each chapter, we have a clear presentation of the breadth and depth of each proving, ready for clinical application.

Ms. Herrick has structured the provings in an original manner that will be of particular interest to anyone who has been involved in provings. Historically, the ultimate resource for the design of a proving is in Hahnemann's Organon, § 121-142 and more recently described by Jeremy Sherr in The Dynamics and Methodology of Homoeopathic Provings.

Perhaps the first goal in designing a proving is to identify credible and conscientious provers (§126), ideally provers highly sensitive to the substance being proved, acknowledging that, in Hahnemann's words, 'the most excellent provings remain those that the healthy, unprejudiced, conscientious and fine-feeling physician employs upon himself (sic)', §141.

The provers in Ms. Herrick's provings are all experienced in homoeopathy, if not actually homoeopathic physicians, which effectively maximises the insight of the provers regarding what is valid and valuable in their experience.

The provings collect the symptoms in two particular ways. First, as is commonly done, the provers maintain journals and are supported and encouraged in this process. Secondly, the symptoms are reviewed and recorded in a group setting. The journals endure as the private and untampered experience of each individual prover; the group session assists in symptom recall, clarification, and understanding.

From my own experience as a prover and proving director, I am sure that the most commonly uttered phrase is, 'I felt that, but I didn't think it was related to the proving!' When a prover hears that other provers had exactly a symptom they had only minimally described, or not recorded at all!, they are free to elaborate and work together to contrast or clarify individual symptoms. The proving review session enables the entire proving group to be involved in conceptualising the information.

Jeremy Sherr has emphasised the importance of a single proving director, to maximise what he calls the 'As if one person' phenomenon. This particular proving design where the journal review is actually staged in one time and place, bringing together all those involved, enables the merging of the experiences and understanding of all the different provers.

The video-taped session becomes the record and reference for the 'As if one person' approach to understanding the proving.

The result is an elegant compilation of individualising symptoms that promises to be directly useful in clinical practice.

For me, the most poignant proving is that of Milk of the Horse, Lac Equinum. Unhappily for the provers, and happily for anticipated patients, the suffering was palpable in the proving of this substance. We read from different provers' journals:

'Continue to be impatient and confrontational at every encounter. ... I saw my mind going haywire.... I was struck by the disregard and demoralisation... Dream Like Pulp Fiction, ... my partner pulls a gun on the victim. I am shocked and then he points the gun at me... Intense nightmare: multiple beings or people against me. Violent interaction with multiple other animals and beings, fighting for my life... Desperate, apathy. Life is hard feeling. Depressed, hopeless angst about the world, 'What is this whole thing about anyway?' ...Band-like sensations around neck like a ribbon choker pulled too tight. .. feeling of suffocation.. Dream: with terrorist-type, I'm in great danger of being murdered...'

In a final note to the book, Claire Green, N.D., describes how the journal entries were translated into rubrics, using existing rubrics where the fit was perfect, and creating new ones where necessary. Sample rubrics for Lac Equinum include:

ANXIETY; breathing; suffocative
DELUSIONS
fail, everything will
hard, everything is
hardship, life is
DREAMS
alien from outer space; killing him,
trying to
moral feeling; lack of; others, in

If this image doesn't fit with your idea about horses, consider the plight of the horse before abandoning the Law of Similars. Reading from the discussion of the Milk of the Horse, we learn:'One of the earliest uses of the noble beast was to drink his blood and eat his flesh.
... The Irish king even took a formal bath in horse soup at his inauguration ceremony.
... Man has subjugated the horse
... (which has) first and foremost
... been used in battle
... without the slightest idea of what the screaming and shooting was all about.The overall proving is summarised into the following themes, each elaborated by entries from the provers' journals:

Apathy / Ennui; Difficult Encounters / Frustration; Confrontational / Critical / Nasty; Mistakes; Organisation; Impatient; Irritable; and finally, Killing / Violence.

I particularly appreciate the broad scope of the book, which includes both the raw data and an overview of the proving. The book is attractively and spaciously arranged, with plenty of room for questions, reflections and clinical experience.

There are occasional notes where a proving symptom has also been useful to cure a symptom clinically. The additions to our homoeopathic pharmacopoeia by these provings and by other recent provings are only the first step; we also need the clinical additions of actual practice experience.

Or, with metaphoric license, a true understanding of each of these remedies must be ,milked' from clinical cases and 'fleshed out' by our collective experience, inspired by the 'pearls' generated by these provings.

Homeopathic Links - Autumn 1998
Reprinted with permission from Homeopathic Links



From HOMEOPATHY TODAY
Reviewed by Richard Moskowitz, MD, DHt

This is an important and useful book by one of the finest homeopaths in the world today. Arising from Hahnemann's first experiments with China in 1790, provings have always been part of the definition of homeopathy, distinguishing it from all other forms of medicine and healing, and providing an experimental foundation for the action of medicines on human beings that could be of great value to the medical profession as a whole. Most of all, they have given us a practical tool for the education and training-of students,

1) by cultivating students' inner awareness of the changes elicited by remedies in themselves as a basis for identifying and paying attention to the sufferings of their patients, and

2) by showing how detailed symptomatology of many individuals can be used to compose a portrait of the essential themes and common features of the remedy as a whole.

Yet in spite of the honorific status paid to them, usually in the form of lip service, very few practitioners bother to undertake new provings today. In our own defense, it could perhaps be argued that the herculean task of mastering known remedies must take precedence over adding yet more to the list since the huge quantities of time and energy consumed by provings must be subtracted from the already limited quota available for patient care.

In any case, the many new provings now being published represent a long-overdue return to fundamentals that is good cause for celebration. The work of Rajan Sankaran and his group in India and Jeremy Sherr and his students in the UK have provided useful insights into remedies both old and new, including Strontium carb Ambra grisea, Anhalonium, and Crotalus cascavella in the one case, and Scorpion, Hydrogen, and Chocolate in the other. Likewise, we all owe David Riley a debt of gratitude for his double-blind protocols, however vain and quixotic his dream of satisfying our fiercest critics in the New England Journal of Medicine and elsewhere.

But what is still missing from the literature of these provings, and what students are not likely to understand without actually participating in one of them, is the intermediate step between assembling the detailed symptomatology of the individual provers, the "raw data" of the providing, and its end result or "bottom line" of specific additions to the Repertory.

This is exactly the same mysterious but indispensable process by which students must learn to grasp the whole or "essence" of each remedy from the sum of its parts. It is this pivotal issue around which every Materia Medica runs the risk of saying either too much, and losing the forest for the trees, or too little, by reducing remedies to pat formulae and ignoring the details on which their meaning is built. Such tricky navigation is of the nature of our art, and nobody ever said it was easy.

Nancy Herrick's book provides the homeopathic community with a welcome broadening of this narrow and often trackless path. Following in the footsteps of the old masters, Jeremy Sherr's elegant new provings remain largely silent about "essence," taking their stand on such definite rubrics as can be cast in Repertory language, and consigning the broad themes to an introductory section in which each remedy is discussed in a general way, including elements of chemistry, natural history, folklore, and common speech. In his diligence to avoid the second risk, he runs a little afoul of the first, of reducing the whole to a mere collection of items.

Much influenced by Sankaran in this respect, Herrick has managed to avoid both pitfalls by simply filling in and thus widening the trail that has to be marked out between them, doing full justice to the raw data of the proving and the rubrics and additions she could extract from it, but also taking the extra step of identifying several of the underlying themes that tie them together.

Without such proving data to back it up, learned talk about "essences" can be as slippery as a President caught in the act, and as dangerous as a Special Prosecutor out for his blood. By contrast, when creatively identified and faithfully documented -from provers' actual experience, a few unifying features can provide a wealth of depth and enrichment to the dry and tedious litany of rubrics, however crucial they may be.

Each of her remedy pictures consists of:

1) a general introduction to the biology and mythology of the animal, followed by
2) some basic ideas she has identified and singled out, with detailed illustrations of each
3) rubrics both old and new, as translated into Repertory language, and
4) the complete verbatim journal entries of each individual prover.
The importance and validity of her contribution thus rests very largely on the integrity and relevance of these fundamental issues, about which critical judgement will necessarily await more practical experience with them from her readers.

But simply from reading them, I can already attest to their value in studying the remedies as a whole and learning to recognize them clinically. In part, that is because they are more interesting to read that way, because they tally with and make sense of what we already know about these creatures and their place in Nature. For exactly that reason, their basis in actual symptomatology serves as a check on our own prejudices, no less than the author's. Herrick's uniquely empathic personal style is evident throughout the book, and her writing is admirably lucid and unpretentious.

A few methodological features deserve further comment. The first is her decision not to use either the double-blind or single- blind protocol, but only the original method of not telling the individual provers which remedy they were taking, with the implied assurance that they would be getting something, that there were no placebo controls. In my view, this is the better choice for several reasons, but how gutsy and controversial it must have seemed to her at the time is suggested by her inadvertent lapse into the double negative, "Neither supervisors nor provers do not know what the substance is," which is clearly shown to be an error a few sen- tences later, "Each prover [is] blinded totally as to the substance..."

She does not say so, but I get the feeling that her main reason for avoiding the placebo-control model is less ideological than empathic, and arises from her identification with her people, her wish to give them a genuine and shared experience and thus to prove worthy of their trust.

Indeed, her empathic gifts shine through all her teaching as well as her feeling for various remedies, perhaps even occasionally at the expense of her better judgment, e.g, in allowing her provers to ask for supervision if they feel they need it, rather than simply building it into the protocol of the experiment, as Hahnemannian purists have always insisted upon. One can only respect and admire the level of rapport and trust which her choice clearly presupposes, but in her place I might have played it safer.

Finally, and perhaps most important of all, I was curious about her selection of which remedies to prove, about which she says only, "Make sure your choice is a good one," i.e, is worth all the effort. In the brief Introduction, she says a bit more: "The substance is selected based on its relative importance to humans-something that people have a strong feeling about one way or another. For example, people love roses; they hate rats." Once again, although her considerable gifts of intellect and understanding are applied at every point in the structure of the proving, her ultimate criterion is simply a feeling, a direct, empathic connection with both the animal being tested and the human subjects participating in the experiment.

Indeed, all of the animals she has selected could be thought of as distinct archetypes or totems of our human relationships with the animal world in general:

1) rat's blood
2) elephant's milk
3) lion's milk
4) wolf's milk
5) dolphins milk
6) dinosaur bone (fossilized)
7) butterfly (whole insect)
8) mare's milk

Because six of the eight are mammals, Herrick used the milk in five of them, and would have done so in the rat as well, but could not obtain a specimen and settled for the blood. It is perhaps worthy of note that the blood of the Norway rat, as the source of all devastating plague epidemics in our history, may be partly responsible for its unsavory reputation, and was chosen for proving by Sankaran for much the same reason.

Of the other mammals, elephants, lions, wolves, and dolphins are all endangered species facing extinction from the ravages and depredations of human beings, while the horse survives marginally as a slave bearing human burdens. Indeed, Herrick seems to have chosen to prove them in part at least for our sake, moved by pity, grief, and shame from being implicated in the wholesale destruction of their natural way of life and the irreplaceable loss of their beauty.

Likewise in the case of the fossilized dinosaur bone, she characteristically selects a species well known for its strong maternal instincts, the Maiasaura or "good mother lizard," of which she says, "... the mother must have kept the young in the nest until they were quite well developed. She brought food and nurtured and protected [them] for a long time, until they were ready to forage for themselves. This is unusual in the dinosaur or lizard realm, where the eggs are usually abandoned after they are laid ... [It is thus] the only dinosaur to receive a feminine name using an -a at the end rather than an -us. ..."

Here again, she exalts the concept of homeopathic similarity beyond the level of isolated symptomatology with an empathy of feeling, through identifying in this case with the maternal or feminine archetype, as precious and improbable in the ruthless world of Tyrannosaurus rex and its ilk as in our own.

Yet another wonderful touch is her choice of the butterfly, a fragile, delicate creature of gorgeous colors and ephemeral beauty that completes a full life cycle in the span of a few days, perhaps the crowning symbol of the transitoriness of life and all that is precious in it, much in the spirit of the Butterfly Dance which the Hopi tribes still perform every year.

By some personal alchemy of her own, Herrick's trained intellect and fine aesthetic sensibility have transmuted her pure human feeling and love for other creatures into eight superb medicines from the animal world that remains so much a part of us all. For that achievement, and even more for the spiritual gift that envisioned it and carried it out, we again lie happily in her debt.

Homeopathy Today
January 1999
Reprinted with permission from the National Center for Homeopathy

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Contents

Foreword -- ix-x
Introduction -- xi-xvi
Acknowledgements -- xvii-xx
How to Use This Book -- xxi
Rat -- 1-48
Elephant -- 49-96
Lion -- 97-136
Wolf -- 137-216
Dolphin -- 217-266
Dinosaur -- 267-300
Butterfly -- 301-350
Horse -- 351-402
Bibliography -- 403-404
Resources -- 405
A Methodology for Creating Rubrics -- 406-407

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