Background
Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann was born on April 11, 1755, 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.
Samuel Hahnemann Monument at Scott Circle, Washington, D.C.
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Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann was born on April 11, 1755, 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."
Christian's father, who disdained formal education, would often withdraw his son for what he called "thinking lessons," but Hahnemann persisted, drawn to the study of medicine.
Hahnemann studied medicine for two years at Leipzig. 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.
Still fascinated with science, especially chemistry, Hahnemann further immersed himself in the study of pharmacy after his move to Dessau in 1781.
In 1784 Hahnemann published his first medical work. As the protective father of many children facing a host of diseases and illnesses, Hahnemann became increasingly uncomfortable with the medical techniques of the day, later dubbed the "Age of Heroic Medicine." Lack of medical knowledge coupled with a belief in evil spirits and curses led well-meaning physicians to prescribe such treatments as blood letting, in which doctors would remove nearly all of patients' blood. Another popular treatment was blistering, an attempt to draw toxins out of the body through the application of hot substances. Doctors also dispensed huge doses of drugs including mercury, arsenic, opium, and alcohol, often trying to induce vomiting and emptying of the bowels. "Massive doses of calomel," noted a writer for FDA Consumer, "not only cleaned the bowels, they also caused teeth to loosen, hair to fall out, and other symptoms of acute mercury poisoning. Such 'heroic' therapy often prolonged the illness, if it did not kill the patient outright." In the United States, George Washington died in 1799 after being treated for sore throat. His therapies included bloodletting and blistering with cantharides, a concoction made from dried beetles.
Hahnemann recognized the fallacy of such treatments, and instead encouraged his own patients to seek exercise, healthy food, and fresh air. Eventually, he became so disen-chanted with medicine and his inability to effectively treat disease that he quit his job and moved to Dresden. There he spent five years studying chemistry and working on translations of scientific texts and other books into German. Working on his own experiments, Hahnemann began to make important discoveries while gaining eminence for his own publications.
While translating William Cullen's Lectures on the Materia medica into German, Hahnemann began to doubt Cullen's theory about Cinchona bark, a Peruvian plant that is now the basis of the malaria cure quinine, so he launched his own experiments, using himself as a guinea pig. Taking large doses of the substance, Hahnemann developed the fever, chills, thirst, and throbbing headache that characterize malaria. This experience convinced Hahnemann that small doses of the same substance would prompt the body's own immune system to fight off the disease, in much the same way a flu shot carrying deactivated germs wards off the flu. This became Hahnemann's famous maxim, like cures like, or the Law of Similars.
For years, Hahnemann enlisted his family for experiments that involved inducing various symptoms, testing out more than 2,000 substances ranging from herbs to snake venom, and carefully recording the results. Finally, he began to apply his remedies to actual sick people, administering concoctions he hoped would mimic the symptoms already being exhibited by the patient. At first, Hahnemann noticed that his patients actually became sicker from his substances. This prompted him to dilute his medicines into smaller and smaller doses to find the tiniest possible portion that would still trigger the body's response. To his own surprise, Hahnemann discovered that the more diluted remedies were actually more effective at treating diseases. This became his Law of Infinitesimals, which holds that even though none of the original molecules may remain in a particular dilution, the vital forces, or healing power, of the substance remains.
Hahnemann's remedies were created systematically, in a process that included placing one drop of the substance in 99 drops of water or alcohol, then shaking the container vigorously, and repeating the process several times. In theory, after several dilutions, not a single drop of the original substance was left.
Assisted by his four grown daughters, Hahnemann conducted hundreds of experiments, or provings, which he collected in his landmark 1810 book Organon der Rationellen Heilkunde, or Organon of Rational Healing. The book, which explains every one of Hahnemann's discoveries and experiments, is widely considered Hahnemann's most important work. In it, he dubs his practice homeopathy, from the Greek words homoio, or similar, and pathos, disease or sickness. Hahnemann called other medical practitioners "allopaths."
The publication of Hahnemann's Organon resulted in immediate controversy, even though homeopathy was used successfully to battle a number of disease epidemics.
Pharmacists opposed Hahnemann because he prepared his own remedies, bypassing apothecaries. As a result he was run out of several towns and nearly forced to quit practicing by apothecaries who banded together and complained to authorities that Hahnemann was infringing on their business. In 1821, Hahnemann was saved by the Grand Duke Frederick of Anhalt-Coethen, a staunch homeopathy believer, who invited Hahnemann to live under his protection and practice freely.
Despite the controversy, homeopathy flourished, and developed a strong following that included many prominent people, like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Daniel Webster, Louisa May Alcott, James Garfield and John D. Rockefeller. Hahnemann lectured widely and in 1828 published another groundbreaking work, Chronic Diseases: Their Nature and Homeopathic Treatment.
Hahnemann's long-time protector and patron, Grand Duke Frederick died. Hahnemann remained in Coethen, lecturing, writing, and receiving students.
Hahnemann, however, was too well-known and his knowledge of homeopathy too in demand. Within a few years, Hahnemann had a larger practice than ever, and students visited from around the world. He spent the last several years of his life visiting patients, lecturing, and revising a sixth edition of his Organon, all the while battling a chronic lung infection that reoccurred each spring. He died July 2, 1843, at the age of 90.
Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann is best known for creating the system of alternative medicine called homeopathy. A qualified medical doctor, he was disturbed by several common medical practices of the era like bloodletting and purging which he believed worsened the symptoms of patients instead of treating them. So feeling the need for an alternative method of therapeutics, he developed the system of healing which he named homeopathy. A prolific writer, he also wrote a number of books, essays, and letters on the homeopathic method.
Christian believed that small doses of natural drugs could provoke symptoms of the diseases they sought to cure, prompting the body's own immune system to heal itself. The practice of homeopathy grew from this theory, based on Hahnemann's thesis that "like cures like. " Homeopathy flourished around the world. He subsequently became a firm believer and helped homeopathy grow quickly in the United States.
Quotations:
"The highest ideal of cure is the rapid, gentle and permanent restoration of health; that is, the lifting and annihilation of the disease in its entire extent in the shortest, most reliable, and least disadvantageous way, according to clearly realizable principles."
"Only freedom from prejudice and tireless zeal avail for the most holy of the endeavours of mankind, the practice of the true art of healing."
"The physician's highest calling, his only calling, is to make sick people healthy - to heal, as it is termed."
"Every effective drug provokes in the human body a sort of disease of its own, and the stronger the drug, the more characteristic, and the more marked and more violent the disease. We should imitate nature, which sometimes cures a chronic affliction with another supervening disease, and prescribe for the illness we wish to cure, especially if chronic, a drug with power to provoke another, artificial disease, as similar as possible, and the former disease will be cured: fight like with like."
"I do not know if I am mistaken, but it seems that one can obtain more truths, important to Humanity, from Chemistry than from any other Science."
"There must be some limit to the thing. It cannot go on to infinity."
"The orthodox school has witnessed for centuries that nature itself has never once cured any existing disease with another dissimilar one, however intense. What must we think of this school, which nevertheless has continued to treat chronic diseases allopathically, with medicines and formulas that can only cause a disease condition -God knows which -dissimilar to the one being treated? Even if these physicians have not hitherto observed nature attentively enough, the miserable results of their treatment should have taught them that they were on the wrong road."
"One might say, for example, that a patient has a kind of St Vitus's dance; a kind of dropsy; a kind of nerve fever; a kind of ague. One would never say, however (to end once and for all the confusion of these names) He has St. Vitus's dance, He has nerve fever, He has dropsy, He has ague, since there simply are not any fixed, unchanging diseases to be known by such names."
Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann was a freemason.
Quotes from others about the person
Minister of Law, Govt. of India, Shri C. C. Biswas:
"If there is scientific system of medicine, in vogue today, it is Homoeopathy; ther systems are more or less empirical, but not so Homoeopathy, which as a scientific basis of its own. That, in fact, was the great contribution of Hahnemann to medical science."
Sir William Ostler (The Father of Modern Medicine):
"No individual has done more good to the medical profession than Samuel Hahnemann.
In Dessau, Christian met Johanna Henrietta Leopoldina Kuchler. The two were married on December 1, 1782, and settled in Gommern, where they welcomed the first of 11 children in 1783.
In 1830, at the age of 66, Hahnemann's wife, Johanna, died. Hahnemann remained in Coethen, lecturing, writing, and receiving students. One of these students was a 35-year-old French woman by the name of Marie Melanie d'Hervilly, whom Hahnemann married in 1835. At the request of his new wife, Hahnemann moved to Paris.
