The origins of homeopathy

This was the cultural and scientific milieu in which the German doctor Samuel Christian Hahnemann (1755–1843) began practicing in 1780. He continued in practice for nine years, during which time he became increasingly disillusioned with the harsh medical methods of the day. In articles written to supplement his income, Hahnemann attacked the extreme medical practices of the day, advocating instead good public hygiene, improved housing conditions, better nutrition, fresh air, and exercise. Eventually his convictions led him to cease work as a doctor. He wrote later that it had been agony to work "always in darkness," with no secure principles in place regarding health and disease.

At this time a period of great social and political change evolved in Europe. The Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment were accompanied by great technological and scientific advances, and increasing freedom of thought and expression. This intellectual climate encouraged important developments in the study of medicine, including the isolation of active ingredients from herbs, such as the extraction of morphine from the opium poppy in 1803. It was in 1790, while translating A Treatise on Materia Medica by a Scottish teacher, physician, and chemist, Dr. William Cullen, that Hahnemann began an investigation which was to prove paramount to the subsequent development of homeopathy. In his treatise Cullen argued that quinine, when isolated from Cinchona officinalis, was a good treatment for malaria because it was an astringent. Hahnemann knew that other, more powerful, astringents had no such effect on malaria. He dosed himself with quinine, recording the results and effectively beginning the first "proving". Although he did not have malaria, he found that he began to develop symptoms of the disease one after the other. With each dose of quinine, the symptoms recurred and lasted for several hours, but if he stopped taking quinine his symptoms began to disappear. Hahnemann went on to test quinine on other people, noting their reactions in great detail. The test subjects were not allowed to eat or drink strong foods such as spices, alcohol, or coffee, which he felt might distort the results. He repeated the proving process on other substances that were in use as medicines, such as arsenic and belladonna, and used the results to build up a "symptom picture" of each remedy's effects.

After conducting provings for six years, Hahnemann extended his research to the sick. Prior to prescription, he gave his patients a thorough physical examination and noted any existing symptoms. He questioned them closely regarding their lifestyles, general health, outlook on life, and other factors that made them feel better or worse. Following the principle of like cures like, Hahnemann then matched individual symptoms as closely as possible to the symptom picture of a remedy, and prescribed accordingly.