Discovery of Homeopathy

By the end of the 18^th/ beginning of the 19^th century, some people began to be critical about the medical treatments available to them. One of the most fanatic critics was the German physician and chemist, Samuel Hahnemann (1755 – 1843). Hahnemann was a highly regarded physician, playing a prominent role in the German medical world. However, he didn’t approve of the way medicines were being prescribed. He thought it was done in an unscientific way and he also noticed how the medicines often did the patient more harm than good. He quit his private practise and started translating foreign medical works into German.

While translating a medical work from English to German, he stumbled upon an explanation on the workings of cinchona in the treatment of malaria. According to the author, cinchona (quinine) worked so well in the treatment of malaria due to a ‘bitter substance’. Hahnemann found this explanation to be highly unsatisfactory but did recognize out of his own experience that quinine was one of the few medicines that actually helped cure malaria. He started experimenting and took some quinine himself. To his great surprise he started showing all the symptoms that belong to malaria. He quit taking quinine and cured.

It was a remarkable discovery; a healthy person takes in the cure of malaria and then starts to show all the symptoms of the disease it is supposed to cure. The question Hahnemann was now asking himself was if this could also be the case with other remedies. To answer this question he initially started experimenting with different substances on himself and later on started working with large groups of test subjects. All of his discoveries were written down meticulously. Not just the changes he saw on the physical level but also everything he saw happening on a mental and emotional level where taken into account.

After years of studying this new method of healing he reopened his practise. Different from the other physicians, he took a lot of time to carefully analyze and take into account all of his patients’ symptoms, complaints and other woe’s. The medicines he described were based on the individual, not the individual’s symptoms and complaints, although these are important, he went a little deeper. His new method proved to be highly successful, curing his patients of symptoms with remedies that would cause the same symptoms on a healthy person.

Hahnemann was the first to develop a carefully and fully worked out method of healing based on the similarity principle. The discovery’s he made where carefully written down in his “the organon of the healing art”, a standard work now, forming the basis for every homeopathic therapist.