Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann (10 April 1755[1] – 2 July 1843) was a German physician who created homoeopathy.
After giving up his practice (c.1784) he made his living chiefly as a writer and translator, while resolving also to investigate the causes of medicine's alleged errors. While translating William Cullen's A Treatise on the Materia Medica, Hahnemann encountered the claim that Cinchona, the bark of a Peruvian tree, was effective in treating malaria because of its astringency. Hahnemann claimed that other astringent substances are not effective against malaria and began to research cinchona's effect on the human organism by self-application. He claimed that the drug evoked malaria-like symptoms in himself, and concluded that it would do so in any healthy individual. This led him to postulate a healing principle: "that which can produce a set of symptoms in a healthy individual, can treat a sick individual who is manifesting a similar set of symptoms."[4] This principle, like cures like, became the basis for an approach to medicine which he gave the name homeopathy.
Hahnemann tested substances for the effect they produced on a healthy individual and tried to deduce from this the ills they would heal. From his research, he initially concluded that ingesting substances to produce noticeable changes in the organism resulted in toxic effects. He then attempted to mitigate this problem through exploring dilutions of the compounds he was testing. He claimed that these dilutions, when done according to his technique of succussion (systematic mixing through vigorous shaking) and potentization, were still effective in producing symptoms. However, these effects have never been duplicated in clinical trials, and his approach has been universally abandoned by modern medicine.
Hahnemann began practicing this new technique, which attracted other doctors c.1792.[citation needed] He first published an article about the homeopathic approach in a German language medical journal in 1796; in 1810, he wrote his Organon of the Medical Art, the first systematic treatise on the subject.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia