Vital
Homeopathy
Origin and Growth of Homoeopathy
CREATION OF HOMOEOPATHY
Hahnemann was dissatisfied with the state of medicine in his time, and particularly objected to practices such as Bloodletting. He claimed that the medicine he had been taught to practice sometimes did the patient more harm than good.
His sense of duty would not easily allow him to treat the unknown pathological state of his suffering brethren with these unknown medicines. The thought of becoming in this way a murderer or malefactor towards the life of my fellow human beings was most terrible to him, so terrible and disturbing that he wholly 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 in 1784, Hahnemann made his living chiefly as a writer and translator, while resolving also 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 Chinchona, 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. Noting that the drug induced malaria-like symptoms in himself, he concluded that it would do so in any healthy individual. This led him to postulate a healing principle: "that which can produce a set of symptoms in a healthy individual, can treat a sick individual who is manifesting a similar set of symptoms."
COINING SIMILIA SIMILIBUS CURENTER
Samuel Hahnemann was the founder of Homoeopathy. He established the fundamental principles of the science and art of Homoeopathy.
This principle, like cures like, became the basis for an approach to medicine which he gave the name homoeopathy. 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.
Dr. Hahnemann espoused the law of cure known as "Similia Similibus Curentur", or "Like Cures Like". 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.
DISCOVERY OF REMEDIAL POWERS AND DISEASE FORMS
Hahnemann discovered the remedial powers 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. The primary action results from the first encounter, between the vital force and the external agent, and the secondary action is a result of the vital force's reaction to the symptoms of that primary encounter.
DISCOVERY OF MIASMS
Dr. Hahnemann described the different aspects of 'acute' and 'chronic' diseases. Acute diseases are transitory and 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, Syphilis, and Sycosis.
Dr. Hahnemann was the progenitor of several modern medical approaches. Deeming the treatment of insane patients to be cruel and harmful, he advised a humane treatment for the insane. He cured many insane patients with homeopathy, and became famous for this success.
Dr. Hahnemann was quick to recognize poor hygiene as a contributory cause to the spread of disease. He also emphasized the importance of nursing, diet, bed rest, and isolation of patients during epidemic diseases. Hahnemann described 'Noxious' principles as the precursors of certain disease states.
ORGANON OF MEDICINE AND MATERIA MEDICA PURA
Hahnemann's three major publications enlighten the development of homeopathy. In the Organon of Medicine (revised six times), we see the fundamentals laid out. Materia Medica Pura records the exact symptoms of the remedy provings. 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.
Dr. Hahnemann treated thousands of difficult and chronic cases that defied the best care from allopaths all over Europe. 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 first published an article about the homeopathic approach in a German language medical journal in 1796. Following a series of further essays, he published in 1810 "Organon of the Rational Art of Healing", followed over the years by four further editions entitled The Organon of the Healing Art, the first systematic treatise and containing all his detailed instructions on the subject.
A 6th Organon edition, unpublished during his lifetime, and dating from February 1842, was only published many years after his death in 1921. It consisted of a 5th Organon containing extensive handwritten annotations. (A reading of each edition will demonstrate the extent of the revision and experience based additions.) The Organon is widely regarded as a remodelled form of an essay he published in 1806 called "The Medicine of Experience", which had been published in Hufeland's Journal.
Of the Organon, Robert Ellis Dudgeon states it "was an amplification and extension of his "Medicine of Experience", worked up with greater care, and put into a more methodical and aphoristic form, after the model of the Hippocratic writings."
Around the start of the nineteenth century Hahnemann developed a theory, propounded in his 1803 essay On the Effects of Coffee from Original observations, that many diseases are caused by coffee. Hahnemann later abandoned the coffee theory in favour of the theory that disease is caused by psora, but it has been noted that the list of conditions Hahnemann attributed to coffee was similar to his list of conditions caused by psora.
In early 1811 Hahnemann moved his family back to Leipzig with the intention of teaching his new medical system at the University of Leipzig. As required by the university statutes, to become a faculty member he was required to submit and defend a thesis on a medical topic of his choice.
On 26 June 1812, Hahnemann presented a Latin thesis, entitled "A Medical Historical Dissertation on the Helleborism of the Ancients." His thesis very thoroughly examined the historical literature and sought to differentiate between the ancient use of Helleborus niger, or black hellebore, and the medicinal uses of the "white hellebore", botanically Veratrum album, both of which are poisonous plants.
DISCOVERY OF HOMOEOPATHIC PHARMACY
Following up the pioneering work of the Viennese physician Anton von Storck, Hahnemann tested substances for the effects they produced on a healthy individual, presupposing (as von Storck had claimed) that they may heal the same ills that they caused.
His researches led him to agree with von Storck that the toxic effects of ingested substances are often broadly parallel to certain disease states, and his exploration of historical cases of poisoning in the medical literature further implied a more generalised medicinal "law of similars".
He later devised methods of diluting the drugs he was testing in order to mitigate their toxic effects. He claimed that these dilutions, when prepared according to his technique of 'potentization' using dilution and succussion (vigorous shaking), were still effective in alleviating the same symptoms in the sick. His more systematic experiments with dose reduction really commenced around 1800-1801 when, on the basis of his 'law of similars,' he had begun using Ipecacuanha for the treatment of coughs and Belladonna for scarlet fever.