World Homeopathy Awareness Week

Celebrating the 250th birthday of its founder, Dr. Samuel Hahnemann

by Kathleen Boehning

The Past

Dr. Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843) was a brilliant yet arrogant physician who became disenchanted with the medical practices of his day. Hahnemann watched in disgust as his contemporaries applied mercury to syphilitic cores, until patients salivated abundantly and their hair fell out. I’m reminded of the Saturday Night Live skit with Steve Martin where he plays a doctor who blood-lets and then advises patients to wear a drool bucket.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t too far from the truth. Our own beloved George Washington was bled to death by his well-meaning physicians.  

Hahnemann eventually gave up medicine, turning instead to translating medical texts to support his family. He translated one paper which postulated that malaria was cured by quinine because it was a “bitter.” Deciding to taste the substance himself, Hahnemann was inspired to formulate the first principle of homeopathy: he discovered malaria treatment produced intermittent fever, chills, and  profound exhaustion, the same symptoms as the disease! And so the law of Similars was rediscovered.

Hahnemann was undoubtedly acquainted with Hippocrates, the father of medicine, who was the first to profess this principle. Hahnemann proved homeopathic medicines cure that condition which  the medicine causes in a healthy individual. He named this branch of medicine after the Greek words “homoios”, or similar, and “pathos”, or illness or suffering. (It’s also the root of the word pathology.) 
Hahnemann was homeopathy’s first prover, and china officinalis, or cinchona, the first homeopathic remedy.

To give further example: we drink coffee to stay awake so, if we are unable to sleep, trying coffea, a diluted homeopathic remedy, may just help us sleep. Or, if your eyes water due to allergies, allium cepia, derived from the common onion, might give relief.

So, we have homeopathy’s first guiding principle, or “Like Cures Like.”

Hahnemann went on to gather a group of healthy volunteers to help prove additional remedies. That is, the volunteers took a new medicine until they experienced previously unknown symptoms.

As he used these first similimums, Hahnemann oberved that medicines often caused harsh reactions before they went on to affect a cure. He began to experiment with diluting the remedies to lessen the severity of these reaction. He unwittingly started to succuss or shake vigorously the bottle in between each successive dilution Thus, he discovered another of homeopathy’s guiding principles: the more dilute the drug, the more potent its effect.

Hahnemann’s success with cholera, yellow fever, and typhoid- the epidemics of his day- won him converts throughout Europe, America, and eventually worldwide. America’s first women doctors, practicing in the wilds of the Nevada territory, carried arnica pellets in their medicine bags.

Unfortunately, Hahnemann’s pomposity, his demeaning tongue and pen, angered and alienated many of his fellow physicians and pharmacists. In 1856, the American Medical Association was formed to defeat homeopathy, banning its practitioners from joining the organization. Any discussion of its practice was banned from their journal. The AMA went so far as to exclude physicians whose only offense was to be married to a practitioner who used the approach.

Moreover, a powerful politician in the early 1900s made sure that homeopathic medical universities were excluded from receiving the financial support shown traditional medical schools at the time. Without financial support, the homeopathic universities eventually folded. 

Only in recent days have physicians, thanks to the demands of patients, revisited the holistic, gentle therapeutics of homeopathy.