The Father of Homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann, chose the road less traveled. Born in 1755 in Meissen, Saxon, Germany, his unusual intelligence and skill in many languages was evident from a very young age. Hahnemann was fluent in German, Latin, Greek, English, Spanish, and French. While studying to become a doctor of medicine, he supported himself by tutoring fellow students and by translating medicals texts and treatises on botany and chemistry.
After completing his degree in 1779, Hahnemann began practicing medicine, but he soon became disillusioned with the conventional treatment of that time, which included violent purging, bloodletting, and leeching. He saw that this barbaric medical treatment often hastened the death of the patient. Hahnemann quit his practice, continued his study of chemistry, and supported his large family by translating classical and current medical texts into various languages and by publishing his own writings on chemistry.
In 1791, while translating the book A Treatise on Materia Medica by Scottish physician and chemist William Cullen, Hahnemann was dissatisfied with Cullen’s explanation of why Cinchona, a medicine made from the bark of a Peruvian tree, was useful in treating cases of malaria. Having seen many cases of malaria himself, he decided to experiment and discover the effects of Cinchona on himself. Hahnemann found that by taking daily doses of cinchona he experienced symptoms of malaria which went away when he stopped taking the drug.
He reasoned that since Cinchona could produce malarial like symptoms in a healthy person, that it could be used to treat a person sick with malaria. In other words, he rediscovered that law of nature, the Law of Similars that Hippocrates and Paracelsus had taught centuries ago. For the rest of his life, Samuel Hahnemann would continue to experiment, promote, and refine this alternate therapeutic system based on laws of nature and a unified understanding of the way medicines affect the human body.
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