Vital
Homoeopathy
Father Of Homoeopathy
Dr. Christian Frederic Samuel Hahnemann is popularly known as Father of Homoeopathy. He was a German physician. He was born on 10 April 1755. He is also known as the Father of Experimental Pharmacology because he was the first physician to prepare medicines in a specialized way by proving them on healthy human beings, to determine how the medicines acted to cure diseases.
He was born in Meissen, Saxony near Dresden. His father Christian Gottfried Hahnemann was a painter and designer of porcelain, for which the town of Meissen is famous.
As a young man, Hahnemann became proficient in a number of languages, including English, French, Italian, Greek and Latin. He eventually made a living as a translator and teacher of languages, gaining further proficiency in Arabic, syriac, chaldaic and hebrew.
Hahnemann studied medicine for two years at Lepzig. Citing Leipzig's lack of clinical facilities, he moved to Vienna, where he studied for ten months. After one term of further study, he graduated MD at the University of Erlangen on 10 August 1779, qualifying with honors.
His poverty may have forced him to choose Erlangen, as the school's fees were lower. Hahnemann's thesis was titled Conspectus adfectuum spasmodicorum aetiologicus et therapeuticus. [A Dissertation on the Causes and Treatment of Cramps]
In 1781, Hahnemann started to work as a village doctor in the copper-mining area of Mansfeld, Saxony. He married Johanna Henriette Kuchler and eventually had eleven children. Later he abandoned medical practice and worked as a translator of scientific and medical textbooks.
Hahnemann travelled around Saxony for many years, staying in many different towns and villages for varying lengths of time, never living far from the River Elbe and settling at different times in Dresden, Torgau, Leipzig and Kothen before finally moving to Paris in June 1835.
CREATION OF HOMOEOPATHY
Hahnemann was dissatisfied with the state of medicine in his time, and particularly objected to practices such as Bloodletting. The medical practice was of a very crude form. He claimed that the medicine he had been taught to practice sometimes did the patient more harm than good.
His was a conscientious human being and his sense of duty would always resist him to practice the prevailing medical science. He used to think that practicing medicine with his present knowledge would be equivalent to a murderer of life of his fellow human beings. This was so terrible and disturbing that he gave up his practice in the first years of his married life and occupied himself solely with chemistry and writing.
After giving up his practice around 1784, Hahnemann made his living as a writer and translator. At the same time his mind always used to investigate the causes of medicine's alleged errors. While translating William Cullen's ‘A Treatise on the Materia Medica’, Hahnemann encountered the claim that Cinchona, the bark of a Peruvian tree, was effective in treating malaria because of its astringency.
Hahnemann believed that other astringent substances are not effective against malaria and began to research cinchona's effect on the human body by self-application. To his surprise he noted that the drug induced malaria-like symptoms in him.
Later after a series of experiments, he concluded and postulate a healing principle ‘simila similibus curenter” meaning likes cures likes. In simple language a substance which can produce a set of symptoms in a healthy individual, has the ability to treat a sick individual who manifests with a similar set of symptoms.
This means that a remedy that produces symptoms in a healthy person will cure those same symptoms when manifested by a person in a diseased state. This law of cure has been verified by millions of homoeopaths all over the world since the time of Hahnemann.
This principle, like cures like, became the basis for an approach to medicine which he gave the name homoeopathy (meaning similar suffering). He first used the term homoeopathy in his essay Indications of the Homoeopathic Employment of Medicines in Ordinary Practice, published in Hufeland's Journal in 1807.
Samuel Hahnemann was the founder of Homoeopathy. He established the fundamental principles of the science and art of Homoeopathy. He postulated the principle of Vital force, the force which is behind the functioning of a human being.
Later Hahnemann discovered the remedial powers of hundreds of drugs and inert substances such as gold, platinum, silica, vegetable charcoal, lycopodium, etc. By preparing the medicines through potentization, these inert and insoluble substances became soluble in alcohol or water and were charged with medicinal force.
Hahnemann discovered the primary and secondary actions of remedies. Primary action results from the first encounter, between the vital force and the external agent. Secondary action is a result of the vital force's reaction to the symptoms of that primary encounter.
He also described the different aspects of 'acute' and 'chronic' diseases. Acute diseases are transitory. They have a beginning and an end, whereas the chronic diseases are co-existent with life. Either they are present in a manifest or a latent state. From this work came the chronic miasms of Psora, sycosis and Syphilis.
Dr. Hahnemann cured many insane patients with homeopathy, and became famous for this success. He quickly recognized poor hygiene as a contributory cause for the spread of diseases. He also emphasized the importance of nursing, diet, bed rest, and isolation of patients during epidemic diseases. Hahnemann described noxious agents as the precursors of certain disease states.
Dr. Hahnemann treated thousands of difficult and chronic cases that the best allopaths all over Europe could not do. Thus, he became so famous that physicians from Europe and America came to him for coaching in the new science and art of healing, called Homoeopathy.
He left for the heavenly abode on 2 July 1843 leaving behind this great science of homoeopathy to be practiced by the world in a judicial, ethical and non violent method. The human race shall always be indebted to him forever.
HAHNEMANN'S WORKS CAN BE MAJORLY SUMMARIZED AS FOLLOWS -
1. The Organon of Medicine (revised six times), which is the basis and fundamentals of homoeopathic practice
2. Materia Medica Pura which has records and exacts of symptoms of the remedy provings.
3. In his book, "The chronic diseases, their peculiar nature and their homoeopathic cure", he showed us how the natural diseases become chronic in nature when suppressed by improper treatment.
4. For the selection of a remedy, situation demanded the invention of a repertory, which is a compulsory tool for every physician for selection of a symptom or rubric and know which remedy covers that symptom for the treatment a disease.