Dr SAMUEL HAHNEMANN (The pioneer of Homoeopathy)Dr SAMUEL HAHNEMANN was born in Meissen, Germany, on 10th April, 1755. His parents were people of education and taste but extremely poor. His father's profession as that of a painter on porcelain. When Hahnemann went to Leipzing to study medicine at the age of twenty, he had no money but his ability to translate scientific works at his leisure time enabled him to make a living while he was studying. It is this habit that explains his profile literary output. He managed to save enough money to leave Leipzig for Vienna to study at the most advanced school of medicine in Europe. While still a medicial student, Hahnemann became family physician to the Governor of Transylvania. During his course of duty with the Governor, he spent two years in the impenetrable marshy lands of Hungry. Here the majority of people suffered from ague with all the concomitant ailments of that condition. By the time he qualified as a doctor in 1779, he had acquired a thorough knowledge of the illness and its treatment. He married in 1781 and his married life was a happy one despite the many changes of home and the controversies he caused in the medical profession. By 1786, Hahnemann had an exceptional reputation throughout Germany not only as a doctor but also as an author and an experimenting chemist. The more he investigated contemporary theories and practices, the more his doubts increased as to the benefit of medical treatment at that time. By the end of the century, he was not alone in believing that current medicine was not good but positively harmful for the patients. The most unscientific prescriptions were applied indiscriminately. Patients were bled by venesection and cupping, and the leeches by dozens were applied to those suffering from any complaint.
Pharmacology was in such disrepute at that time that the situation was of immediate concern to every physician. Hahnemann complained that if he sent a prescription to ten different pharmacists, invariably he would receive ten different preparations, each having a different effect upon the human system. So hopelessly wrong did all these things appear to Hahnemann that in 1796 he threw up a flourishing practice, and plunged himself and his family into dire poverty saying the could no longer incur the risk of doing injury to people.He started devoting more and more of his time earning a living by translating foreign medical texts into German. It was in one of these texts that he came across an idea, which not only changed his thinking altogether but also his attitude in life. This was the dictum of the Holy Prophet of Islam (peace be upon him)- "If one wing of a fly could cause disease, its other wing had the power to cure that disease". In the desperate conditions prevailing in the medical profession at that time, this was a thought, provoking ideas for him. He became deeply involved in this revelation. While he was diligently seeking the light, suddenly it flamed before his eyes. One of his children fell ill and the background of her suffering (due to eating of a few leaves of the cinchona tree) sent the born physician back to his life work, determined to investigate the whole question of medicine in all languages. He set his soul to discover, as he puts, it, "If God had not given some certain Law, whereby the diseases of mankind could be cured".Hahnemann's eyes opened by that initial experiment with cinchona. He realized (and his subsequent experiments conducted during some fifty years, confirmed this) that " IT IS ONLY BY THEIR POWER TO MAKE SICK THAT DRUGS CAN CURE SICKNESS; AND THAT A MEDICINE CAN ONLY CURE SUCH MORBID CONDITIONS AS IT CAN PRODUCE, WHEN TESTED ON HEALTHY PERSONS."
Hahnemann did not immediately make his theory public but spent a number of years expanding and developing it by investigating a number of other drugs etc. and carrying out further experiments on himself, his family and other healthy persons. When fully convinced of this theory, he found the enunciation of the Law in the remarkable words "SIMILIA SIMILIBUS CURENTUR" (let likes be treated by likes). Hahnemann held: "Life is sustained by the VITAL FORCE. Disease is due to some outside influence that disturbs the smooth functioning of the vital force and this gives rise to symptoms. Allopathic medicine is undesirable because it merely masks the symptoms; homoeopathic medicine, on the other hand, brings about a true recovery." Along with the law of SIMILIA, Hahnemann evolved the second principle of Homoeopathy - the law of infinitesimals. The law declared that "the smaller the dose, the more effective in stimulating the vital forces". He carried this practice to its extreme. He declared that "DYNAMISATION", as he called it, was a process, by which the medicinal properties of drug, which were in latent state in the crude substance, were excited and enabled to act spiritually (dynamically) upon the vital force. Such dynamisation, he said, made active medicines more active and rendered active some substances (such as sand and common salth) that were not usually regarded as medicines at all. Another aspect of Homoeopathy was Hahnemann's declaration that chronic disease was the result of allopathic suppression of PSORA (the itch) and other external disorders. He argued that such diverse ailments, as deafness, asthma, insanity, etc. resulted from allopathic treatment of itch. It was only in about 1805 that Hahnemann began to practice homoeopathy seriously. Until then, he had been constantly on the move, hardly spending a year in one place. In 1811, he moved to Leipzing where he became very successful. He lectured at the Leipzing University and gathered around him small but devoted hand of followers, who studied homoeopathy under him and collaborated with him in his "PROVINGS". In 1810 Hahnemann published his most important work, the ORGANON OF HOMOEOPATHIC MEDICINE. The following year, he published the first volume of his MATERIA MEDICA PURA, the result of all his drug findings. He listed in it the remedies tested and described in detail and symptoms caused by each. The orthodox (allopathic) practitioners, who were prescribing drugs by the spoonful, Hahnemann's ideas were utterly ridiculous. For a number of years, all went well for him at Leipzig. Then trouble came. He found himself attacked by the orthodox doctors. For sometime, their criticism was silenced by the arrival in Leipzing of Prince Schwarzenberg, who had recently defeated Napoleon just outside the walls of the city and who had now come expressly for the purpose of being treated by Hahnemann. Unfortunately, after an initial improvement, the Prince died and Hahnemann was blamed. His critics took advantage of this to obtain an injunction preventing him from dispensing his own medicines. He was thus forced to leave Leipzing. He accepted the post of Court Physician to the Duke of Auhalt Kothen, the ruler of a small German principality. At Kothen, his practice in homoeopathy flourished well. Here he was able to introduce a number of new medicines for the treatment of chronic diseases, many of which, such as cuttle fish ink (SEPIA) and quartz sand (SILICIA), had never been used as medicines before. Now his fame spread throughout Europe. In 1831 Hahneman was able once again to test and prove his theories in a massive way. This time all of Europe came down with an epidemic of cholera. In other acting on Hahnemann's principles of homoeopathy, had tremendous success.
By now, Hahnemann was an old man and growing increasingly frail. However, he still had surprises in store for his followers. When he was 75, his wife died: they had been married for nearly 48 years and had produced eleven children. Four years later in 1834, he contracted a most unexpected second marriage to a young French portrait artist, Melanie, who was also one of his students. In 1835, Melanie took her husband to Paris, where Hahnemann set up a most successful practice. Once installed, doctors, chemists and scientists from all over Europe consulted him. He lived very happily until his death on 2nd July 1843. Melanie continued to practice homoeopathy after his death. By the time of Hahnemann's death, homoeopathy had spread through Europe and across the channel and Atlantic to Britain and America.