Samuel Hahnemann
1755-1843
German Physician
Samuel Hahnemann is regarded as the founder of homeopathy, a controversial type of medicine that revolves around the principal that "like cures like," or that a disease can be cured by medications that produce the symptoms of that disease in healthy people.
Hahemann was born in Saxony (now part of Germany) in 1755. This was the time of the Enlightenment, a political and intellectual movement that swept through Europe encouraging freedom of thought, religion, and education. Hahnemann's family was poor, but stressed learning. His father taught him never to learn passively, but to question everything he was told. The young Hahnemann read everything he could get his hands on, and by the time he was 24, could read and write at least seven languages, and had read almost every medical text written in Europe.
Hahnemann became a doctor in 1791, at the age of 36, and practiced conventional medicine for nine years. Even so, he was always known as an avid experimenter, chemist, and rebel who was unafraid to speak his mind or challenge conventional wisdom. He was also unafraid to experiment on himself. In 1790 he was testing a theory that Peruvian bark (also called quinine) was useful in treating malaria. Hahnemann gave himself repeated small doses of quinine and noticed that he started to suffer fever, chills, and other symptoms of malaria. He concluded that the reason that quinine was useful against the disease was because it caused symptoms similar to the disease itself.
Hahnemann called his new theory "homeopathy," (from the Greek homoios, which means "similar," and pathos, which means "suffering") and from then on practiced medicine on the premise that like treats like. He began doing experiments with many conventional medicines of the time to prove his theory. In 1810 Hahnemann published the first edition of The Organon, which defined his homeopathic philosophy of medicine. The same year, Napoleon attacked Hahnemann's hometown of Leipzig, killing 80,000 people and leaving behind a typhus epidemic. Hahnemann had great success treating the survivors with homeopathic remedies, and his reputation as a healer spread.
Nevertheless, Hahnemann was ridiculed by the medical and scientific establishments for his ideas. He was particularly disliked by the apothecaries because his treatments called for using only one medication at a time, and in small doses, causing the apothecaries to make very little money from his patients. In addition, the apothecaries did not always make preparationsas precisely as Hahnemann's treatments required, and he even accused some of giving patients the wrong prescriptions. Hahnemann soon began to dispense his own medicines, which was illegal in Germany at the time. The apothecaries brought charges against Hahnemann and had him arrested.
But Hahnemann continued his work. By 1821 he had proven 66 homeopathic remedies and had published a reference work called Materia Medica Pura. In 1831 a cholera epidemic swept through central Europe, killing thousands of people. Hahnemann instituted the first widespread use of homeopathy to fight the epidemic, and achieved a 96% cure rate (as opposed to the 41% cure rate achieved by allopathic doctors of the time.)
In 1834 Hahnemann met and married Marie Melanie d'Hervilly, a socialite from Paris who was less than half his age. They worked together in his practice in Paris until July 2, 1843, when Hahnemann died at the age of 88. By the time of his death, homeopathy was slowly spreading throughout Europe and North America, despite the mainstream medical profession's opposition. Homeopathic medicine was especially popular with royalty, artists, and other celebrities. Hahnemann's homeopathic methods persist today, and many of his original remedies are still prescribed by homeopaths throughout the world.
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