Studying the Materia Medica

Similia includes an integrated Materia Medica section where you can read and search across multiple sources to study remedies and confirm prescriptions.

Basic workflow

1. Open Materia Medica.
2. Select a remedy from the list, or filter by name or abbreviation.
3. Use Search in Materia Medica to find words or phrases within the texts.
4. Choose a Search Mode depending on how strict you want the match to be.

The remedy list and the Coverage column

The Materia Medica browse table lists remedies with a Coverage column. Coverage is the number of Materia Medica sources in your library that contain that remedy, so a remedy covered by more sources has more material to read. Hovering the value shows "Covered by N sources". You can sort the table by Coverage to find the best-documented remedies first.

Search modes

Materia Medica search supports several modes:

• Words in sequence
• Words in same sentence
• Words in same paragraph
• Semantic Search

Keyword search supports prefix matching, hyphenated terms, cross-references, and multi-word filtering.

Semantic Search for Materia Medica

Semantic Search can be used with classic Materia Medica authors and with premium/add-on sources the user owns, including Murphy, Richard Pitt, Mangialavori, Meditative, Griffith, Scholten, Hatherly (The Lacs), Saine (Monographs and Summaries), and Vermeulen sources where available.

How to use it

1. In Materia Medica, set Search Mode to Semantic Search.
2. Add one or more symptoms as separate entries.
3. Press Enter or Tab to add a symptom.
4. Use Backspace on an empty input to remove the last symptom.
5. Choose which sources to search. Only sources you have access to are available.
6. Click Search.

Reading results

• Results are ranked by how strongly remedies match your symptoms across the selected sources.
• You can open a result and use View Full Text with Highlights to jump into the Materia Medica with matched passages highlighted.

Source and author controls

Materia Medica results can be filtered by author/source. Some authors are grouped into dropdowns where several books belong to the same author family, such as Pitt, Boger, Lippe, and Vermeulen.

Materia Medica author priority can be reordered in Settings. Classic author priority is available for non-Pro users. Premium authors appear when the account has access.

Remedy and taxonomy filters

Materia Medica search can be narrowed by:

• specific remedy
• author/source
• remedy taxonomy, including kingdom and family

These filters help focus searches on a remedy group or a botanical, mineral, or animal family.

Public author and book pages

Similia has public Materia Medica author/book pages and a library catalog. These pages help users inspect available sources and read public classic material outside the app.

Updated on: 17/07/2026