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...