Burnett: the Homeopathic rebel with a cause. Part 1
15 June 2026 | by The Contemporary College of Homeopathy
Burnett: the Homeopathic rebel with a cause – Part 1
Dion Tabrett (MCH MSc RShom) has been in full-time practice since graduating in 1992 from the London College of Homeopathy. He is a regular Lecturer at The Contemporary College of Homeopathy, and is the author of the book “Burnett Rediscovered”. This book describes Burnett’s work, prescribing style and clinical strategies. (Part 1 of an excerpt taken from Dion’s lecture at The Contemporary College of Homeopathy, April 2026.)
Back in Britain, around the start of the 20th Century, Dr. James Tyler Kent’s teachings became very popular amongst the medical homeopaths1. And there were certain homeopaths, Sir John Weir and Margaret Tyler, who went to Chicago, in America, and trained with Kent2. They then came back to Britain and said that we must all fall in line and practice Kentian-style Homeopathy. However, not everybody agreed, and there were particular homeopaths such as James Compton Burnett3, who had a very eclectic and experimental approach to prescribing in clinic.
So there was a fragmentation in British homeopathy. There were those who wanted to align themselves with Kent and say that all other forms are essentially inferior. Then the other group who were saying, “well, we're not stopping our experimentations, we're going to do what we keep doing because it works really well in clinic”. What we will do now is look at some of the rebels who didn't fall in line.
There were four particular homeopaths: Burnett, Clark, Cooper and Skinner. They all formed a group called The Cooper Club4, and they would meet sometimes weekly, certainly monthly, and have dinner together to converse and talk about clinical results, provings that they had done on themselves, and applications of Materia Medica. Now, Clark would take notebooks and fill them with this information, and when his notebooks were full, he would pick up the napkins and write on them and take them home too.
And then he would incorporate that information into his three-volume Materia Medica. So, there’s a three-volume Materia Medica by John Henry Clark called The Practical Dictionary of Materia Medica5. And if you read that book, you will see repeatedly the four initials of the members of the Cooper Club: JCB for James Compton Burnett, TS for Thomas Skinner, JHC for the author John Henry Clark, and RTC for Robert Thomas Cooper.
Those four initials crop up again and again and again, usually in brackets and usually at the end of a cured symptom or a clinical symptom or a proving symptom. And what this meant was that homeopaths like Douglas Borland, John Weir and Margaret Tyler all became antagonistic towards members of The Cooper Club, because they weren’t in their gang anymore. Because they were all aligned with Kentian-style classical homeopathy6, whereas The Cooper Club were vastly experimental7, and we’ll look at some of the ways that they worked, and the things that they did, shortly.
Incidentally, it's worth noting here that Kent was very respectful of Burnett, if you read Kent’s Materia Medica and his lecture on Tuberculinum, he mentions Burnett three times. Because Burnett had a tubercular nosode a good number of years before Kent had his, so Kent learned about it via Burnett’s work and then trialed it, found it fantastic, incorporated it in his clinic, and wrote about it in his Materia Medica8.
So, James Compton Burnett was born in 1840 and died in 1901. He was a medic who, like Hahnemann, spoke a number of different languages, notably French, German and Greek. Coincidentally or not, he also studied at Vienna University, the same location where Hahnemann had studied medicine9. When Burnett finished his degree, he stayed on an extra two years studying Anatomy, with the professor of anatomy and assisting him in the classes. Then he came back to the UK, and he studied medicine in Glasgow, and then he started his first practice in Merseyside, Liverpool.
Check back for the 2nd part of this lecture excerpt by Dion Tabrett, which focuses on Burnett’s practises and discoveries that made him a distinguished pioneer in Homeopathy, and how this breakaway lineage continued through the 20th Century and directly into modern-day teachings within The Contemporary College of Homeopathy.
References:
1Wikipedia contributors. (2026). James Tyler Kent. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Tyler_Kent (cited 2026 June)
2Smyth, G. J. (2019). The Faculty of Homeopathy: Celebrating 175 years of excellence in Homeopathic practice. Homeopathy, 108(04), 223–229. https://doi.org/10.1055/s-0039-1700534
3Support, B. F. (2024). Burnett, James Compton (1840 – 1901). Hahnemann House Trust. https://www.hahnemannhouse.org/james-compton-burnett-1840-1901/ (cited 2026 June)
4FROM COOPER CLUB TO FLOWER ESSENCES: A PORTRAIT OF BRITISH HOMEOPATHY 1870-1930 - Peter Morrell. (n.d.). http://www.homeoint.org/morrell/articles/pm_coope.htm (cited 2026 June)
5Wikipedia contributors. (2025). John Henry Clarke. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Clarke (cited 2026 June)
6Campbell, A. (1999). The origins of classical homoeopathy? Complementary Therapies in Medicine, 7(2), 76–82. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0965-2299(99)80085-5
7Morrell, P. (2024). Dr. Robert Thomas Cooper - 1844 - 1903 - Peter Morrell. Hpathy.com. https://hpathy.com/homeopathy-papers/dr-robert-thomas-cooper-1844-1903/ (cited 2026 June)
8TUBERCULINUM BOVINUM from Materia Medica by James Tyler Kent. Homeopathy. (n.d.). https://www.materiamedica.info/en/materia-medica/james-tyler-kent/tuberculinum-bovinum (cited 2026 June)
9Patil, B. K., & Gandhi, M. A. (2024). The Life and Legacy of Samuel Hahnemann: founder of homoeopathy and his medical philosophy. Cureus, 16(9), e70489. https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.70489