hahnemann

Samuel Hahnemann was the founder of Homeopathy. Yet the foundations and seeds of homeopathy had been in discussion for many many years before.

" The cure of the part should not be attempted without treatment of the whole. No attempt should be made to cure the body without the soul. If the head and the body are to be healthy you must begin by curing the mind…for this is the great error of our day in the treatment of the human body, that physicians first separate the soul from the body."

Plato - The Republic 382BC

• Hahnemann was born on the 10th April 1755 in Meissen, Germany and died in 1843. He practiced as a physician until 1783 when he become disillusioned with the practice of allopathic medicine. As a linguist, speaking German, French, Greek and Latin amongst others, he went onto translate texts especially those of a medical nature.
• When translating the Scottish physican William Cullen's Materia Medica, he came across the section on the toxicology of Peruvian bark, China Officinalis. The similarities between this and the symptoms of malaria stimulated his thinking. Could it be such a coincidence? He investigated further by taking the substance China himself. This initial investigation founded the process of thought that what can make you ill, can also make you better.
• Remedies are now made from minute, potentised doses of an original substance - including those originating from plants or minerals for example.
• Interestingly, succussing a medicinal substance reduces the adverse effects of the medicine but also simultaneously increases the curative power of the substance. Homeopathic medicines work on an 'energetic' level and so matching diseases which act dynamically, not materially.
• Hahnemann wrote the 'Organon of Medicine' first published in 1810 which explained the philosophies and ideas behind homeopathy. The word Organon stems from the hebrew word for light and the word for tool.
• The last edition was published in 1842 when he was 87 years old. At that time, he was running a successful practice with his second wife Melanie and living in the centre of buoyant, vibrant Paris.