Introduction to Homeopathic

History of Homeopathy

Homeopathy was founded by Samuel Hahnermann (1755 - 1843). was a German physician who was dissatisfied with the medical therapies and theories of his day. He believed the symptoms and signs of an illness are in fact attempts on the part of the organism to heal itself, so that when a substance capable of producing a similar symptom 'picture' to that of the disease is used it encourages a powerful strengthening of the defence mechanism. The physician, therefore, needs to study the totality of symptoms in order to get a full picture of the disease and prescribe the correct remedy. Often it is the symptoms that seem almost incidental, strange, rare or peculiar, that are the most valuable to the homeopathic practitioner, for they give the disease its own particular character and thus suggest the remedy.

The correct remedy, Hahnemann thought, produces a 'resonance' between the person and the substance administered as a therapeutic principle. It is thought to work rather like a similar, but stronger, disease to the one that the patient already has, which Hahnemann observed, always extinguishes the first, as two similar disease cannot exist side by side.

Homeopathic drugs thus works with the system, while allopathic drugs simply repress the symptoms and do not cure the disease. The homeopathic materia medica has been constituted progressively on the basis of primary data from experimentation on humans, termed pathogenetic data, as well as from the toxicology and clinical data collected by Hahnemann and fifty or so of his pupils. In his first texts, the founder of homeopathic restricted himself to highlighting the most striking symptoms.

When editing the six volumes of his Materia Medica Pura ('pure' of any hypothesizing), he saw the need to adopt a logical classification, ordered anatomically by zones and systems of the body, presenting general and mental symptoms separately but without ascribing a superior value to them.

For Hahnemann, the distinction between general and local symptoms was artificial, all symptoms being the expression of general reaction of the patient as a whole. The sole criterion recognized was specificity: a banal and common symptom could become specific by its intensity or frequency. This explains the numerous and tedious repetitions of the same symptoms in Hahnemann pathogeneses, which are objective accounts of experimentation on healthy humans, of toxicological data, and of clinical observation.

As he was translating a book by the Scot, Cullen, on medicines and their uses, Hahnemann challenged the ideas about how such medicines might work. This led him to take the substance himself so he could experience and describe its effects on a healthy human being. Repeating this type of experiment with other healthy volunteers (these experiments were called "provings") led him to observe and describe the basic principles of homeopathic medicine.