Hahnemann

Samuel Hahnemann continued the vitalistic and empirical tradition of Western medicine by the development of homeopathy. Its science and philosophy are directly derived from observation of the sick. He didn’t create any logical or self-evident mode of treatment depending instead on the individualized reduction of the patient’s state. 

Homeopathy by today’s standards is not a science since it is a medicine that does not seek to create a science. It remains an art and the attempt to create a scientific basis for it will most likely be fruitless. Homeopathy is based on ancient principles, the last in major hermetic nineteenth century sciences, and beyond inquiry with the tools standing at the brink of the millennium waiting for new scientific principles to shed light on the responsiveness of the defense mechanism to homeopathic remedies.

Hahnemann defined homeopathy so well in his six editions of the Organon that little has changed today. All medicine was in an experimental phase during his time and mainstream medicine relied on dangerous, primitive, and ineffective procedures and drugs. Physicians could not expect that their patients would get well anymore than they would get worse and die. Hahnemann’s laws of medicine were received with the normal amount of peer criticism and controversy and had no regulatory board or agency to censor him.

The system of rules and experiments that Hahnemann recorded were not as strikingly opposed to thought as they are today and were not seen as a major attack on orthodoxy. He did lump all the clumsy practitioners of his current day under the label of allopaths for physicians other than those that practiced homeopathy. Still, homeopathy can not be verified in the laboratory which essentially disproves any and all of homeopathy’s claims. Mongrel systems of orthodoxy and homeopathy have been devised to attempt to satisfy those eager to please the medical authorities through experimental proof but the more they lean towards classical homeopathic methods the less they have statistically accurate results. The experiments have shown that something is going on and research continues.

Hahnemann did not codify homeopathy himself. The orthodoxy that we now call classical homeopathy was defined about a century later. Hahnemann improved and revised his methods throughout his life testing different remedies at different potencies.

History

Hahnemann was born in the town of Meissen in Saxony, now in East Germany near the Polish and Czech borders, in April of 1755. Samuel’s father was a porcelain painter for the nearby factory. He acquired learning easily and was tutoring Greek and Latin at sixteen. Other medical texts in foreign languages became his study and started to produce his own articles about sores, ulcers, and drugs. The synthesis of Greek alchemy, European herbalism, Arabic chemistry and native pharmacy came from the classically trained mind of years of study.

Hygiene was insisted on by Hahnemann even though it was almost totally unknown in his era. Obvious procedures such as scraping a wound clean or bandaging with alcohol-soaked clothes and fresh air, exercise, and cheerful company were innovations to Hahnemann’s brothers in the medical arts. It was from fear of harming people through the pitiable state of medicine at the time that he supported himself through translations and refused to practice medicine.

In a translation of William Cullen’s Treatise on Materia Medica, Hahnemann takes the philosophy of contraries and ill-informed authors to task. The Scottish physician Cullen thought that the body was full of a nervous energy which becomes blocked and can be relieved through bloodletting. Inflammation was treated with acid or alkaline substances. Hahnemann lashed out at Cullen’s incomprehension of quinine (Cinchona) because of his view that it was useless as a combination of bitter and astringent qualities. Hahnemann went further and tested the substance on his own body noting the similarities of symptoms he experienced to intermittent fever.

Hahnemann was also a pioneer in that he saw the aberrant behaviors of mental patients as a disease. When standard practice was to revile the patient with provocative language with more of the same or use crude cranial surgery and criminal punishment, Hahnemann was asking for isolating patients, boiling utensils, elimination of hydrotherapy, and fresh air. His treatment was the same as a physical disease.

Hahnemann is buried in Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris where there is a large monument to him.

Organon of Medicine

Many translated this work from the original in German but the best version is the last one done by Wanda Brewster O'Reilly. For getting back to the roots, this is where to start. Dense and thoughtful. This is a link to the 5th (Dudgeon) and 6th (Boericke) editions.

Chronic Diseases

The first volume deals with the philosophy of chronic miasms and the second delineates the characteristics of the various anti-miasmatic remedies.