In 1790, a pious German physician named Samuel Christian Friedrich Hahnemann tried to find out why quinine cured the chills and jitters of malaria. He swallowed several strong doses of quinine and was promptly seized with paroxysms very like malaria's. He tried quinine on his wife, son and four daughters: same results. Dr. Hahnemann decided that quinine cured malaria because it produced in the body a "counterfeit disease" with the same symptoms.
For the next six years, while living at times in desperate poverty, he tried doses of well-known drugs on his family and friends. Belladonna, he discovered, produced fever and red eruptions in healthy persons; he tried it on scarlet fever and it drove away the disease. Nux vomica paralyzed the chest muscles; he fed his patients tiny doses to check asthma. Arnica, which in overdoses brought on belly aches, he used in small doses to cure diarrhea. After "proving" scores of drugs, Hahnemann broadcast his famed principle of homeopathy (Greek, homoios, like, and pathos, disease): Similia similibus curentur. (Like should be cured by like.) In Hahnemann's day, doctors used remedies which were often more painful, some times more harmful, than the disease itself: drastic bloodletting for fevers, enormous doses of laudanum, heroic purges of calomel, ipecac. Hahnemann believed that minuscule doses were more powerful than heavy ones. Because of this revolutionary practice, and because he was bad for apothecaries' business, Hahnemann was hounded out of a half-dozen German towns.
But his mild treatments, which allowed nature to take its course, grew very popular: by the time he was old he had fame & fortune. Bald and bright-eyed at 79, he married a wealthy French woman of 35, moved to Paris, where he set up a palatial establishment with huge suites of waiting rooms filled with statues and paintings of himself. So numerous were his patients that their carriages rolled in slow procession all day long for blocks around his mansion. In 1843, at the age of 88, he died, having trained his wife, no doctor, to carry on his work.
In 1825 homeopathy spread to the U. S., where it specially flourished among the Pennsylvania Germans. Bearded homeopaths, whose only knowledge of medicine was gained by mulling over the master's German writings (Organon; Chronic Diseases, Their Nature and Homeopathic Treatment; Materia Medica Pura), traveled from village to village handing out little colored sugar pills from their shabby black bags, fighting bitter trade wars with orthodox, "allopathic" physicians.
An aura of quackery surrounded homeopathy until some 20 years ago, when Founder Hahnemann was given his historic due by no less a personage than Sir William Osler. "No individual," said Dr.
Osler, "has done more good to the medical profession than Samuel Hahnemann."
With his law of similars, and his minuscule doses, homeopaths claim that Hahnemann anticipated the principle of vaccination. Some of his remedies, such as snake venom for control of hemorrhage, are still in use.
Today homeopathy is a perfectly respectable, though minor, branch of medicine. About 10,000 of the 170,000 physicians in the U. S. have had homeopathic training. Their centre is Philadelphia, home of Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital, chief medical school in the U. S.