During one of the breaks at the LIGA congress in Lucerne in October 2006 I picked up Homopathische Leit-Bilder by Alexander Gothe and Julia Drinnenberg at the booth of Haug Verlag. Leafing through the many pages with cartoons I couldnt resist laughing out loud regularly. This, I realized, is how learning should be. Fun!

Becoming a homeopath is usually a call coming from the heart, based on a genuine desire that we share with Hahnemann as he expressed it in 1 of his Organon, namely to heal the sick. That homeopathy offers the possibility, as his next paragraph suggests, to realise the highest ideal of cure through a rapid, gentle and permanent restoration of health, is enough for many to arouse serious interest.

During the training and practice of homeopathy, though, the mind turns out to be an important instrument in making Hahnemanns promise come true. Memorizing, analysing, repertorising, theorising, philosophising our art of healing is full of it, and rightfully so. But sometimes the balance between heart and mind is skewed a bit. A good shaking of the belly is just what the doctor ordered. The ability to laugh about each other, and ourselves, about our role as homeopaths or patients, is healing in itself. And Alexander and Julia have offered this very remedy to us with this marvellous book.

Cartoons exaggerate: that is both their strength and their weakness. By enlarging an aspect to the extreme it makes for easy memorising; the shadow side is that patients will usually not match the caricature. But isnt that true of all knowledge, that true wisdom is rather based on the ability to forget? After feeding the mind with knowledge, further development is only possible if what has been learned is let go of again to be able to welcome newer and deeper knowledge.

Having said that, I wish all those who will pick up this book a joyous learning experience.

Harry van der Zee, publisher