History of Homeopathy

The History of Homeopathy is the history of medical science. At the time of Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843) , medical theories of the period, such as that of the celebrated Doctor Stoll (1742-1788) taught that diseases arose from the influence of a predominant constitution which was determined "by the prevailing weather and epidemic fevers."

In the late eighteenth century, no matter what the disease, physicians had to pay the greatest attention to the condition of the "primae viae" ; most illnesses resulted from gastric impurities, especially bile. The removal of these matters by emetics and purgatives was the principal means resorted to. If signs of bile were absent in the evacuations, in the appearance, and in the taste of the patient, it was a case of latent bile - bilis latens.

Purgatives and emetics demonstrated the truth of these theories. At the same time, "latent inflammations" had to be contended against, wherein lay a great danger in many diseases.

This doctrine was regarded as one of the most brilliant advances in the medical art, and doctors betook themselves to Vienna from all parts of Europe to learn "the successful Stoll method"¹.

One physician wrote : "Stoll is the greatest living physician. He stands, as he deserves, in a position of great repute, and all intelligent persons in Vienna are attended by him." ²

A similarly sweeping rival theory, that of Dr Kampf (1726-1789), argued that most diseases have their seat in the abdomen, and are due to "infarcts."

“By infarctus” , Kampf explained, “I understand an unnatural condition of the blood vessels, especially of the portal veins and larger blood vessels, in which they are plugged and distended in various places by ill-concocted, variously degenerated, fluid-bereft, inspissated, viscid, bilious, polypous and coagulated blood, tarrying and eventually sticking in the circulation, or in which the inspissated serum in the blood, in the glands, in the cellular tissue, together with the above-mentioned blood-dregs, collects, corrupts, dries, and takes on various forms of degeneration in the digestive passages …… ".

All diseases were to be explained using the same theory.

These infarctus spare no age, sex, or temperament ; even infants are not free from them. I can think of very few diseases or accidents which do not arise originally from infarctus." He gives as instances, epilepsy, grey and black cataract, deafness, consumption, abdominal diseases, bladder affections, all kinds of exanthemata, cancer, scurvy, fever, tympanites, dropsy, jaundice, &c.

And the method for treatment pre-heralds what would become Homeopathy’s trademark - dilute solutions of particular extracts assumed to have special properties relating to a disease. So-called ‘Clysters’ consisting of taraxicum, rad. graminis, saponaria, card. bened., fumaria, marrub. alb., millefol., chamomill., verbasc., rye- and wheat-bran ; to which various "appropriate" drugs were added, all being made into extracts by means of rain or lime-water, were employed to disperse the ‘infarctus’.

As with Hahnemann’s later remedies, these solutions were considered to be without side-effects. " Without detriment to the health, two to three clysters can be taken daily for as many years…. Often the labours of a Hercules are required to cleanse such an astoundingly laden, old, intractable bog, and to overcome the stony, and as it were wedged-in degeneration of the blood." wrote one supporter of the method. ³

An enthusiasitc physician wrote: "I have treated many sick persons who have taken more than five thousand clysters before they entirely got rid of the infarctus." ⁴:

Another confidently predicted that : "Kampf's method has too many generally acknowledged advantages ever to lose, at all events, with sensible people, its well-earned reputation… ⁵

Preface to the Second Edition of the Organon

Physicians are my fellow-creatures ; I have no feeling against them personally. The medical art is my subject. We must ascertain whether therapeutics as hitherto taught, has been evolved out of physicians' heads, out of illusion and caprice, or is derived from nature. If it is only the achievement of speculative refinements, arbitrary axioms, traditional observance and dogmatic assumptions deduced from dubious appearances, it is, and must remain a nullity, even though it may date from thousands of years back and show title-deeds conferred on it by all the emperors and kings that ever lived. True medicine is from its very nature a pure science of experience, and should therefore rest only upon pure facts, and the sensible phenomena belonging to its sphere of action, for all the subjects with which it is concerned are distinctly and sufficiently indicated to its sensible appreciation by experience ; knowledge of the disease to be treated and of the action of drugs and also the mode in which the ascertained actions of medicines are to be used in curing diseases, can only be learnt by experience ; its subjects can only be derived from pure experience and observation, and our science should not venture a single step beyond the sphere of pure carefully observed experience and experiment if it wishes to escape degenerating into mere jugglery and nullity. The following few irrefragable considerations will show that the whole art of medicine up to this date, though millions of well-intentioned physicians have adhered to it through two and a half thousand years for want of a better, is nevertheless in all its parts an utterly irrational and useless art. The intellect alone can (a priori) evolve from itself alone no conception of the essential nature of things, of cause and effect ; there must always be sensible perceptions for every one of its dicta concerning the actual. Facts and experience must be at the root of all revelations of truth. If we take a single step outside the region of observation we shall find ourselves in the infinite kingdom of fantasy and of arbitrary assumptions, the parent of disastrous delusion and of absolute nothingness. A sound, unbiassed judgement of this monstrosity easily discerns that what has hitherto been called the art of medicine was only a pseudo-scientific jumble, which, like Gellert's hat in the fable, underwent periodical revolutions, in consonance with the fashion of the day, but in its essential character of a system of treatment always remained the same blind irrational procedure. There was no such thing as a true healing art founded on experience ; everything in traditional medicine was only artifice and imagination in the guise of probability, but altogether opposed to nature and experience. ... the dynamic spiritual power to alter the health of human beings, invisibly hidden in the inner essence of medicines, What had been excogitated, imagined and guessed about medicines, therapeutics now taught how to apply to the assumed fundamental cause of disease, or to single symptoms of it, on the principle of contraries (contraria contraries), according to the doctrine of the hypothesis-framer, Galen, and contrary to nature, and this doctrine was considered amply proved if only sufficiently illustrious authorities could be quoted in favour of it.

Towards the end of 1790, a new system, that of a Scot called John Brown (1736-1788), reached Germany, spreading rapidly amongst physicians.

In Dr Brown’s system, every human being is said to possess a greater or less degree of ‘irritability’., and Health consists upon having just the right amount of irritation. Conversely, disease is the result of either too much irritation (which Brown grandly dubs as sthenia) or too little irritation - asthenia.

The task of the physician was simply to moderate the excess of irritation, or to strengthen the too weak irritation. Thus all diseases were divided into two classes and also all remedies, these were "sthenic" and "asthenic." In affections depending upon too much strength, "irritation diminishing" drugs were employed, which in the order of their efficiency, were bleeding, cold, emetics, purgatives, diaphoretics.

In the asthenic forms of disease, sthenic remedies were employed, which, in the order of their efficiency, were meat, heat, prevention of vomiting, purging and sweating, by meat diet, spices, wine, exercise ; in the more severe cases of disease, volatile stimulants : musk, ammonia, camphor, ether and opium. ⁶

Knowledge of the structure and functions of the organism was only of minor importance, for everything depended on the irritants and the degree of irritability. "So great," says Brown, " is the simplicity to which medicine can be reduced, that a physician when he comes to the sick-bed will only have to elicit three things: First, whether the disease is general or local ; secondly, if general, whether sthenic or asthenic ; thirdly, in what stage of irritation it is." In Brown’s own estimation, his system definitely raised medicine to the position of a true science - "the Science of Nature ".

One of Brown’s contemporaries was a ‘natural philosopher’ called Henrich Steffens. These were times when philosophers brooked no controversy. "True natural philosophy," wrote Steffens, "puts an end to all contradiction and all controversy of opinions and hypotheses with other opinions and hypotheses, and can, therefore,. have no opponent." Steffens dedicated his work to the " Delphic Temple of Higher Poetry,""Natural philosophy has the priority of know-ledge, for it is the knowledge of knowledge, and must be regarded as potentized knowledge."

Every phenomenon was explained without hesitation. "Magnetism is the conversion of oxygen and hydrogen into carbon and nitrogen," says Steffens, while his celebrated contemporary, the philosopher Friedrich Schelling declared firmly [L.c., p. 248.] that oxygen was the principle of electricity.

Spontaneous Combustion of the Human Body

The mystery of Spontaneous Combustion of the Human Body, which had long perplexed the savants of the period was at last explained, by Justus Liebig in a book of the obvious name, published in Heidelberg, in 1850. This disease manifests itself," so it says, "by the sudden ignition of the human organism and its 'combustion with the appearance of flames, so that only ashes or coal, in one case only a spot of grease remained of the whole body."

But the significant thing about this explanation, as with all the new theories, was the attempt to explain health through chemistry. The progress made by chemistry through the discoveries of Lavoisier, especially the newly discovered knowledge of the significance of oxygen, had prompted many researchers to utilise his advance in the field of medicine. Indeed, some now declared that want or excess of oxygen was the proximate cause of disease, "because oxygen combines with phosphorus, sulphur, nitrogen, carbon and hydrogen, and produces acids which diminish the energy of the nerves, thereby deranging the functions of the secreting organs."

1. "The whole body of the consumed persons was penetrated through all its cells by hydrogen gas, at least in sufficient quantities to suffice for its first ignition and the' maintenance of the fire."

2. "An excess of other inflammable matters, as sulphur, and phosphorus, was. simultaneously present."

3. " The body, thus in a high degree inflammable, was not ignited by external fire, but by an electric explosion, in its interior ; the electric spark quickly permeated the body filled with inflammable matter."

On this a contemporary review remarks : "This theory of spontaneous combustion is certainly as satisfactory a one as can be given in the present state of our knowledge and with the imperfectly observed facts."

It was indeed very tempting to utilise the great chemical discoveries in the treatment of disease.

Most diseases were explained and cured in a chemical way. They arose from excess or want of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and phosphorus.

Accordingly there were "oxygenous" remedies: — antimony, mercury, iron, lead, gold, silver, cinchona, acids, camphor, ether, alcohol, narcotics — "hydrogenous" remedies: oleagineous bodies, sedentary habits, fat meat, fish — "nitrogenous" remedies: meat, and "deoxidizing " agents; lastly, "phosphoric" remedies: fish, phosphates of lime and soda, phosphoric acid.

Whatever the particular school adhered to, complex prescriptions containing 8, to, or more drugs were in daily use by physician. There were so-called "magistral-formulas", complex mixtures composed by "authorities " as remedies for certain diseases, and sanctioned by "experience". They were kept ready made by the apothecaries, and no one dared to alter them.

Prescriptions were changed every day in acute diseases, in chronic every two or three days, as the cases reported in the medical journals show ; and what incredible quantities of drugs were poured into the sick man's body.

The Brownians, for instance, prescribed for typhus fever, together with other remedies, 10—12 drops of opium every quarter of an hour till sleep was induced, when the dose was to be doubled, and was then to be gradually increased " till the health of the patient could be maintained by less powerful stimulants."

In "indirect debility", 150 drops of laudanum which means 0.70 grammes of pure opium, were to be given at once, and in the sequel the necessary doses gradually diminished till the desired result was attained.

In difficult labours, the ordinary cause of which was recognised to be "weakness", the parturient woman, according to Browns was to be supported with wine, and if the labour was tedious and difficult, with opium. Opium (later all cinchona) was with this school the best remedy in all diseases depending on weakness.

There were physicians who, according to their own statement, prescribed several pounds of pure opium in the year. Bleeding, saltpetre, calomel in large doses till the teeth were loosened, and energetic salivation were the "matadors" of the antiphlogistic school, supplemented often by evacuating agents,) such as emetics and purgatives.

At the time of any physicians troubled themselves little about the local affection in "general debility"; for this they prescribed simply iron, cinchona, and a number of other bitter drugs. There are few diseases in the treatment of which one can say that the physicians of that day did no harm.

At the same time with the majority of physicians, the desire for knowledge was very limited. Many complaints were made of this. One Professor Baldinger records :

I know one professor of medicine, who will not admit more then nineteen books into his library. If a twentieth volume were dedicated to him, and sent to him carriage paid, bound in morocco, he at once sells it to the library of his university.

Alongside their lack of curiosity, "A savage partisan spirit," wrote one Professor Roose, in 1803, " has taken possession of many minds and seems to be spreading universally.” ⁷ So Physicians split into sects, every one of which embitters the others by violent and often unfounded contradiction, and so prevents all possibility of doing good.

It is into this context that Hahnemann steps.

Samuel Hahnemann

Even as a young physician, Hahnemann seems to have been unpersuaded by the prevalent belief in authority.

As early as 1784, still less than thirty years old, he speaks contemptuously of "fashionable physicians". In 1786 he inveighs in his book on Arsenic against the wretched state of medicine at that time, against "that most fruitful cause of death, the bungling of physicians," who, among other things, powdered ulcers over with arsenic, thus often causing the death of the patients, and who gave this drug in poisonous doses in intermittent fever.

In 1790, he attacked the teachers of materia medica of the day. "The old teachers of materia medica with their puerilities, vagaries, old wives' tales and falsities, are venerated as authorities, even in the most recent times — with a few exceptions — and neither the originators nor their weak disciples deserve to be spared."

He denounced ‘Polypharmacy’ and recommended instead only ‘Simple Prescriptions’.

Are we in earnest in our art ? Very well then ! What would be more like Columbus's egg than to make a brotherly compact to give only one simple remedy at a time in every single malady, without making any important change in the surroundings of the patient, and then let us see with our own eyes what the drug does, how far it helps and how far it does not help ?

Dare I confess that for many years I have never given anything but a single remedy at a time, and have never repeated it till the first dose had exhausted its action, bleeding alone, an emetic or purgative alone — and always a simple never a complex medicine — and never a second till I was quite clean as to the effect of the first ?

Adding caustically, "A qualified doctor is, of course, at liberty to give anything he likes, Nature must submit out of respect for his diploma."

.... Why do they, then, mix so many ingredients ? Because they look upon treatment like investing in a lottery.

If I place my money on enough numbers, thinks the weak-minded gambler, I must win ! Too dear a way, my friend, of attaining your object. If you were right, Zacutus Lusitanus, with his fifty ingredients in one prescription, must have been a matador among physicians.

The esteemed Brown conversely recommended the employment of several drugs at once, never of one at a time.

On this Hahnemann remarks: "This is the true sign of charlatanism. Quackery always goes hand in hand with complicated mixtures, and any one who can recommend (not merely tolerate) them is far removed from the simple ways and laws of nature."

In the following years he was never weary of urging on his mixture-loving colleagues that the " chief law for the physician " was simplicity of treatment.

What was it that really did good ? ….. As long as we do not accustom ourselves to use simple remedies throughout and carefully to consider in each case the accompanying circumstances, habits of life, &c., our therapeutics will remain a combination of guesswork, truth and poetry.

The strangest circumstance connected with this specification of the virtues of single drugs is, that in the days of these men the habit that still prevails in medicine, of mixing together several different medicines in one prescription, was carried to such an extent that I defy Oedipus himself to tell what was the exact action of a single ingredient of the hotch-potch.

The finishing stroke to the treatment of such cases is generally given by old wives, the hangman, the farrier, the shepherd and death. For all that I am not too proud to confess that horse and cow doctors are frequently more successful, that is to say, more skilful in curing old sores than the most learned professor and member of all the academies.

Let this not be denounced as mere empiricism; I would like to possess their workmanlike expedients which are founded on experience, often, it is true, gained in the treatment of animals, but which I would willingly exchange for many medical folios, if they were to be had at that price.

But, on the other hand, far be it from me to draw from them general rules for my treatment or to prefer irrational quackery to the well-considered medical theories deduced from the observations and experience of illustrious and honest men. I know the limits of both.

Thus much, however, is true, and it may make us more modest, that almost all our knowledge of the curative powers of simple and natural as well as artificial substances is mainly derived from the rude and automatic procedures of the common people, and that the wise physician often draws conclusions from the effects of the so-called domestic remedies which are of inestimable importance to him, and their value leads him to adopt simple natural means to the great advantage of his patients. I will spare my readers proofs of this.

Like Kant, whose motto sapere aude he borrowed, he was a great enemy to coffee, but a great advocate of exercise and open air, and also of the beneficial action of change of climate and residence at the seaside, all things which were then little spoken of in medical works.

Next to nourishment, exercise is what is most important for the animal machine, by it the clockwork is wound up. These delicate creatures should not be confined to needlework, nor allowed to loiter over the toilet table, to play cards, to pay tedious visits or to read enervating books, whereby they would be reduced to the condition of colourless plants grown in a cellar.

Hahnemann was an early advocate of the importance of hygiene, and of recreation.

Varied, agreeable society, with occasional music, is the best thing for cheering the human soul that is not depressed to the condition of an insensible lump, and even should we meet with persons sunk so low among our patients, they must at first be forced to go into society, just as we force the child to swallow the healing draught. They should even accustom themselves to social converse at the sacrifice of more remunerative occupations, until they acquire a taste for it, especially when morality, temperance, and exercise can be combined with it. How else can we get rid of care or acquire a hopeful view of life except amid a happy throng of our like-minded fellow creatures, amongst whom we can cast off the burdens of life, and mutually bestrew our paths with flowers?

Adding that the strictest cleanliness in dress and in the whole mode of life must be maintained, along with exercise, open air, and recreation, he maintained. Similarly, he was far ahead of his contemporaries in the treatment of mental inllenss. Physicians then treated excitable and refractory maniacal patients like wild animals ; it was thought necessary to cow and terrify them. Corporal chastisement and nauseating medicines were the usual means used. 'Maniacs' were strapped down on a horizontal board which could be quickly turned on an axis to a vertical position, or put in the so-called rotating chair. "A well fitted up madhouse was, in certain respects, not unlike a torture-chamber," says Westphal. ⁸

Hahnemann's treatment of the insane instead was more enlightened :

I never allow an insane person to be punished either by blows or any other kind of corporal chastisement, because there is no punishment where there is no responsibility, and because these sufferers deserve only pity and are always rendered worse by such rough treatment and never improved." ⁹

He treated and cured in this way in 1792, the Chancellery Secretary Klockenbring of Hanover, a man well known to literature, who had become deranged. After his complete cure from madness this sufferer showed his deliverer, "often with tears in his eyes, the marks of the blow and stripes his former keepers had employed to keep hire in order." As his biographer puts it fairly, no physician since [[Paracelsus]] had dared to expose with such frankness and boldness the miserable condition of the medical treatment of the period.

In an anonymous article, ¹⁰ in the year 1808, after he had for twenty years past been calling the attention of his contemporary physicians to the evils wrought by the healing art he writes :

It must some time or other be loudly and publicly said, so let it now be boldly and frankly said before the whole world, that our art requires a thorough reform from top to bottom.

What should not be done is done, and what is essential is utterly neglected. The evil has come to such a pitch that the well-meant mildness of a John Huss is no longer of any use, but the fiery zeal of a stalwart Martin Luther is required to clear away this monstrous leaven.

No other science or art, or even handicraft, has advanced so little with the progress of time, no art is so behindhand in its radical imperfection as the medical art.

Sometimes one fashion is followed, sometimes another, first one theory then another, and when the new does not seem to answer, the old is again tried (which was found to be inadequate before).

In the same year, 1805, he says in his Medicine of Experience: ¹¹

...those substances which we term medicines are unnatural irritants, only calculated to disturb the health of our body, our life and the functions of our organs, and to excite disagreeable sensations, in one word to render the healthy — sick.

No principles are yet universally recognised, according to which the curative powers of medicines (even of such as have never yet been employed at the sick bed) can with certainty be ascertained a priori, without first subjecting them to the infinitely tedious process of testing them in haphazard fashion at the sick bed, which is almost never convincing and is usually attended with injurious effects.

Hahnemann’s first proving of Bark.

For the sake of experiment, I took for several days four drachma of good cinchona bark twice a day ;

my feet, finger tips, &c., first grew cold, I became exhausted and sleepy ; then my heart began to palpitate, my pulse became hard and rapid ; I had intolerable anxiety, trembling (but not rigor), prostration in all my limbs ; then throbbing in the head, flushing of the cheeks, thirst, and in short all the ordinary symptoms of intermittent fever¹² appeared one after another, but without actual febrile rigor.

In a word, even the special characteristic symptoms of intermittent fever, dullness of the senses, a kind of stiffness of all the joints, and in particular the disagreeable numb sensation which seemed to be located in the periosteal covering of all the bones of the body, made their appearance.

This paroxysm lasted two to three hours each time and returned when I repeated the dose, otherwise not. On leaving off the drug I was soon quite well.

Contraria contrariis curentur versus similia similibus

In chronic diseases, Hahnemann contends, the mode of treatment according to contraria contraries must be rejected ; it is improper to treat constipation by purgatives, the excited circulation of hysterical, cachectic and hypochondriacal patients by venesection, acid eructations by alkalies, chronic pains by opium, &c.

And although the great majority of my medical brethren still adhere to this method, I do not fear to call it palliative, injurious and destructive.

Every powerful medicinal substance' produces in the human body a peculiar kind of disease, the more powerful the medicine, the more peculiar, marked and violent the disease.

We should imitate nature, which sometimes cures a chronic disease by superadding another, and employ in the (especially chronic) disease we wish to cure, that medicine which is able to produce another very similar artificial disease, and the former will be cured ; similia similibus.”

Most medicines have more than one action ; the first a direct action, which gradually changes into the second (which I call the indirect secondary action).

The latter is generally a state exactly the opposite of the former. In this way most vegetable substances act.

But few medicines are exceptions to this rule, continuing their primary action uninterruptedly, but of the same kind, though always diminishing in degree, until after some time no trace of their action can be detected, and the natural condition of the organism is restored.

Of this kind are the metallic (and other mineral ?) medicines, e.g., arsenic, mercury, lead.

If, in a case of chronic disease, a medicine be given whose direct primary action corresponds to the disease, the indirect secondary action is sometimes exactly the state of the body sought to be brought about.

Palliative remedies do so much harm in chronic diseases, and render them more obstinate, probably because after their first antagonistic action they are followed by a secondary action, which is similar to the disease itself.

Every simple medicinal substance, like the specific morbific miasmata (small-pox, measles, the venom of vipers, the saliva of rabid animals, &c.) causes a peculiar specific disease — a series of determinate' symptoms, which is not produced precisely in the same way by any other medicine in the world.

With a few simple remedies, used singly one after the other, more frequently however with one alone, we may restore to normal harmony the greatest derangements of the diseased body, we may change the most chronic, apparently incurable diseases (not unfrequently in the shortest space of time) into health — whereas we may, by the employment of a heap of ill-selected and composite remedies, see the most insignificant ailments degenerate into the greatest, most formidable and most incurable diseases.

Hahnemann even wished to see the names of diseases abolished, though he makes the following observation:

We observe a few diseases that always arise from one and the same cause, e.g., the miasmatic maladies [no distinction was made in those days between miasma and contagium], hydrophobia, the venereal disease, the plague of the Levant, yellow fever, small-pox, cow-pox, the measles and some others which bear upon them the distinctive mark of always remaining diseases of a peculiar character ; and because they arise from a contagious principle that always remains the same, they also always retain the same character and pursue the same course, excepting as regards some accidental concomitant circumstances, which, however, do not alter their essential character.

Hahnemann's only gradually worked towards the tiny - some would say non-existent- odes characteristic of homeopathy. In 1791, he recommended to commence giving narcotic vegetable medicines "invariably in very small doses." In 1793 he recommended a dose of one-tenth to one eighth gr. of arsenic instead of the usual dose of three to five times that quantity. "¹³

"In future times, when we may expect physicians to be more conscientious, clear-sighted and circumspect, this extremely violent poison will be converted into an extremely useful remedy for the most desperate ailments of suffering humanity", Hahnemann writes.

When a teaspoonful of tincture of helleborus niger twice a day is recommended by one authority, Hahnemann remarks: "This enormous dose should assuredly be diminished to a twentieth part. Two drops of the strong properly prepared tincture of black hellebore are enough to act powerfully on an adult, and will do all that is possible to be done in cases where the tincture is indicated, and if it is not indicated so large a dose will cause irreparable damage."

He did not use medicines prepared in this way for the same purposes as others physicians. He did not advocate their administration to produce emesis, purgation, or narcosis; neither did he employ them to "cleanse the blood of acridities" or to "combine with the excess of oxygen present in inflammatory blood". He did not aim at "cutting the phlegm", "resolving obstructions", "softening indurations", or destroying parasites.

"In Poison There is Physic."

He had discovered that with medicines, selected according to his rule and which therefore were not meant to effect a revolution in the body, such preparations influenced favourably the curative process. At first he himself was astounded at his discovery which he speaks of as "unheard of" and "incredible."

He was therefore, all the more anxious to make sure of his ground as he proceeded, and was not only able to confirm, but even , to extend his remarkable discovery. In the first years of this discovery he dwelt emphatically on the weight of the drug contained in his preparations, and recounted to the astonished world the results obtained by a millionth, billionth, &c., part of a grain of medicine.

In 1805, in his Medicine of Experience, he says: "None but the careful observer can have any idea of the height to which the sensitiveness of the human body to medicines is increased in disease. It transcends all belief when the disease has attained a great intensity……"

Later he adds grandly of his findings:

Has He [the Creator] not bestowed on us means and knowledge whereby we may diminish the more and most powerful substances into small and the very smallest doses and administer them in the tenth of a grain, the more powerful in the hundredth, the thousandth of a grain, the most powerful in the millionth, billionth, aye, even the trillionth, quadrillionth and quintillionth of a grain?

Hahnemann’s ‘testings’ confirmed to him that the action of a drug was not proportional to its quantity, that, e.g, twice or three times the quantity did not produce twice or three times the effect; the diminution of the action of the drug was not proportionate to the diminution of its quantity.

Further, he found that with the above mentioned mode of preparation the efficacy of many drugs, instead of diminishing, increased; that medicines so prepared gave results which could not be obtained with the crude substances. Also the astounding fact became evident that medicines could be so diluted that neither physics nor chemistry could discover any medicinal matter in them, and yet they possessed great healing power.

Highly poisonous substances could thus be converted into beneficent and innocuous remedies, and substances which were easily decomposed, and therefore tending to become inefficacious, could be converted into a form in which they were not liable to decomposition, and thereby became powerful remedial agents in the hands of a skilful physician.

For William Ameke at least, the dedicated biographer, this is Hahnemann's greatest discovery, one of the most momentous discoveries ever brought to light by human research. By this discovery alone he became one of the greatest benefactors of the human species; it must inevitably work a complete revolution in the science of therapeutics, and will make its way for the weal of suffering humanity in spite of the keen opposition of university faculties and their unreflecting followers.

Life of the Homeopath

Hahnemann was born at Meissen, in the kingdom of Saxony, on the 10 th of April, 1755 ; he was the eldest of a family of ten. His parents adhered to the evangelical form of religion. His father was a painter on porcelain, and his circumstances were not such as to permit him to spend much money on his son's education ; young Hahnemann was, therefore, destined to learn his father's trade.

On several occasions he took me away from the grammar school for years together, in order to devote me to some other occupation more suitable to his means. My teachers prevented this by refusing all fees during the last eight years, only begging him to allow me to stay with them and follow my inclination.

He had to fight a hard battle with adversity. Besides diligently attending the courses of lectures, he taught German and French to a young Greek from Jassy, and further increased his income by translations. He probably worked through many nights, while his fellow-students were enjoying themselves in places of amusement.

I can myself testify that while I was at Leipzig I honestly tried to follow my father's injunction never to play a merely passive part in the matter of learning. Neither did I neglect exercise and fresh air, in order to preserve that strength of body by which alone mental exertion can be sustained.

On the 1st of December ; 1783 , he married Henrietta Küchler , the step-daughter of an apothecary at Dessau, named Haseler , whom Hahnemann calls an excellent apothecary.

Hahnemann everywhere displayed indefatigable literary industry, and was considered a learned and very skilful physician. He was in Gotha from the year 1792 , and treated the well-known author and private secretary, Klockenbring , who was confined in a lunatic asylum founded by the Duke at Georgenthal, with acknowledged success. In 1806 , he removed to Torgau. Here he wrote his Organon der rationellen Heilkunst, and in 1811 he went to Leipzig to qualify himself at the University there, so as to be able to give lectures on his new system of treatment. Here he and his pupils were zealously occupied with proving medicines on their own bodies, and the further development of his doctrines.

His increasing practice aroused the envy of the doctors, and his practice of dispensing his own medicines alarmed the apothecaries. The latter took proceedings against him in 1819 , on account of his dispensing his own medicines. Hahnemann in vain contended in an able vindication ¹⁴ that his medical treatment did not come under the existing medicinal regulations, and that his therapeutic implements had nothing to do with the medicines subject to these regulations.
In vain! Hahnemann was forbidden to dispense his own medicines, and it was made impossible for him to practise in Leipzig. Duke Frederick Ferdinand of Anhalt offered him a refuge at Cöthen, together with full liberty to practise as he chose.

Brunnow's account of Hahnemann in Leipzig .¹⁵

On a bright spring day in the year, 1816 , I, then a young, newly inscribed student of law, was strolling along the pleasant promenades of Leipzig with some companions. The University then possessed several notabilities, and not a few originals among its professors. Many a professor and tutor marched gravely along in the old Franconian dress of the previous century, with wig and hair bag, silk stockings and buckled shoes, while the flaunting students of the various nationalities strutted about swaggering in hussar's jackets and braided trousers, or in leather breeches with high dragoon boots and clanking spurs.

"Who is that old gentleman with the intelligent face, walking arm-in-arm with a stout lady, and followed by four rosy-cheeked girls ?" I asked one of the older students near me .


"That is the celebrated Doctor Hahnemann , with his wife and daughters ?" was the answer. "He walks round the town regularly every afternoon."


"Who is this Hahnemann," I asked ? "for what is he celebrated ?"


"He is the discoverer of the homeopathic method of treatment which is upsetting the old system of medicine," replied my acquaintance, who, like me, was an inhabitant of Dresden, and who served under the banner of Themis.

Brunnow made further inquiries, and as he was himself in indifferent health, he consulted Hahnemann , and wad admitted to intercourse with the family, concerning whom he gives us welcome information:
Hahnemann was then in his 62nd year. Silvery locks surrounds his lofty, thoughtful brow, beneath which his intelligent eyes flashes forth with piercing fire. His whole face had a calmly inquiring grand expression ; only at times did the expression of a delicate humour replace that of deep earnestness which indicated that he had gone through many troubles and struggles. His bearing was upright ; his gait firm, his movements alert, like those of a man of thirty.

When he went out he dressed quite simply in a dark coloured surtout, and breeches and boots.
In his own room, however, he liked to wean a brightly-flowered dressing-gown, yellow slippers and black velvet cap. His long pipe was seldom out of his hand, and this indulgence in tobacco was the only relaxation from his abstemious mode of life. His drink was water, milk and white beer, his food extremely frugal.
His whole domestic arrangements were as simple as his dress and food. Instead of a bureau, he used a large plain square table on, which three or four huge folios lay, in which he had entered the histories of the maladies of his patients, and which he was accustomed, when interviewing them, to consult diligently, and in which he wrote down their cases. For his examination of patients was carried out with the exactness which he recommends in his Organon.

Hahnemann received me most kindly, and our intimacy increased every day. I was attached to him by strong bonds of veneration and' gratitude. I shall never forget the good he did me. The life in Hahnemann ’s house was peculiar. The members of the household and his academic pupils lived and worked for one object' alone — that was homeopathy, for which everyone strove to labour in his own way.

The four grown-up daughters helped the father in preparing his medicines, and willingly took their part in proving the various remedies. The students who were devoted to the great reformer were still more eager to do this, and their names are still to be found carefully recorded in the pathogeneses of the various remedies in the Materia Medico Pura. The patients were enthusiastic in their praises of the grand results of homeopathy, and became apostles of the new teaching among the unbelievers……

When the day's work was done, Hahnemann was accustomed to recruit himself from the hours of eight to ten by conversation in a familiar circle of friends. All his friends and pupils had free access to him, and were happy and cheerful while smoking and drinking white beer. In the middle of the listening circle in his comfortable armchair with his long pipe in his hand, sat the venerable Aesculapius, and alternately related amusing and serious stories from his stormy life, while puffing clouds of smoke from his pipe. Natural Science and the condition of foreign nations often formed the subjects of those evening conversations.

Hahnemann had a special partiality for the Chinese, and for this reason that they lay very great stress on the respect and strict obedience due from children to their parents—a duty which is becoming more and more neglected in our civilised European world.

Hahnemann 's family, indeed, presented an example of the old German family discipline. It was evident that the children not only obeyed but truly loved their parents. Hahnemann demanded not only intelligence and industry from his pupils, but also strict morality. I know of a case in which a talented young medical student was forbidden the house on account of a disreputable connexion with a pretty girl of easy virtue. With regard to religion, Hahnemann , who belonged to the Lutheran confession held aloof from all dogmatic creeds. He was a pure Deist, but he was this with full conviction. I cannot cease to praise and thank God when I contemplate his works", he was accustomed to say.

Hahnemann was always happiest in his family circle, and displayed here as nowhere else a most amiable disposition to mirth and cheerfulness. He joked with his children in the intervals which he could devote to them, sang cradle songs to the little ones, composed little verses for them, and used every opportunity to instruct them. Although at first he had but little, he spent as much as he could possibly save on the education and culture of his children. He wished them to learn what was worth learning.
Hahnemann paid attention, too, to the education of his daughters. All the authors who describe Hahnemann 's family life from their own experience agree in bearing witness to the cordial relations existing between Hahnemann and his children.

Small and sturdy in form, Hahnemann is lively and brisk ; every movement is full of life. His eyes reveal his inquiring spirit ; they flash with the fire of youth. His features are sharp and animated. As old age seems to have left few traces on his body, so is it with his mind. His language is fiery, fluent ; often it becomes vehement as a stream of lava against the enemies and opponents — not of himself personally, for that he never alluded to but — of the great truths to the testing of which he had summoned his colleagues for many decades. His memory seems to be unaffected ; after long interludes and side conversation he continues where he left off.

When he becomes heated in conversation, which often happens, whether about friend or foe, or on scientific subjects, his words flow forth uninterruptedly, his whole manner becomes extremely animated, and an expression appears on his countenance which his visitor [Griesselich] admired in silence.
Perspiration covers his lofty brow ; his cap is removed even his long pipe — his trusty companion — goes out and must be relighted by the taper which is at hand and kept burning all day. But the white beer must not be forgotten!

He was a good meteorologist, and was something of a weather prophet. This he owed to the hygrometer, barometers and thermometers which he liked to watch in his room and garden. He was not less thoroughly acquainted with geography ; and a rich collection of maps formed part of his large library, containing works on all branches of science. Magnetism and Mesmerism were more closely allied to the study of medicine.
Hahnemann paid especial attention to them both and made use of them in certain cases of disease with favourable results. Up to his latest years Hahnemann spent a great part of his leisure hours in reading.

Hahnemann 's wonderful and thorough acquaintance with all branches of knowledge can, notwithstanding his natural gifts, be only accounted for when we learn from Hartmann that his health was such that he could work through every other night, and this he doubtless frequently did.

In the year 1834 a highly cultivated French lady, thirty-four years of age, Mélanie d'Hervilly Gohier (born in 1800), came to Cöthen and placed herself under Hahnemann 's medical treatment. She succeeded in fascinating Hahnemann by her intelligence, her unusual degree of culture and her natural grace, so that he resolved to throw in his lot with hers. His friends heard with surprise, as Rummel states, that the old man of eighty had married again on 28 th January, 1835 . His young wife persuaded Hahnemann to quit his native land. She thought Paris was the town where her husband's renown could be still further extended; Paris alone could give him the honour which was his due.Hahnemann yielded. And Paris and France did not fail to fulfil his wife's promises. He was received with enthusiasm and distinguished marks of honour in Paris, and enjoyed high respect and grateful recognition up to the end of his life.

His domestic life there seems to have been very happy, as is apparent from his letters. Thus he writes on the 13 th of August, 1840 , to Dr. Schreter of Lemberg, [Archiv. f. hom. Heilk., Vol. XXIII., H. 3, p. 107 .] in a letter published after his death : “I cannot remember in my long life having ever felt better and happier than here in Paris, where I am enjoying the affectionate intercourse of my dear Mélanie , who cares for nothing in the world more than for me.”

Citation

Main source: The History of Homeopathy: Its Origin; Its Conflicts.
by Wilhelm Ameke, M. D.

(Wilhelm Ameke 1847 - 1886 was an orthodox doctor who converted to homeopathy to become one of the great historians of Samuel Hahnemann and of homeopathy. He died, aged just 39 of tuberculosis.)