Biological Sketch of Hahnemann



And what was the reception this admirable work met with — the most original, logical, and brilliant essay that had ever appeared on the art of the medicine? A thousand captious objectors arose, who, not being able to refute the masterly arguments brought forward by Hahnemann, fell to ridiculing the technicalities of the system; an easy task, since we all know that every new truth appears at first ridiculous. Nor was calumny silent. Hahnemann was loaded with the most opprobrious epithets because he introduced the custom, then unusual in Germany, of making the patients with whom he corresponded pay him for each epistolary consultation. This the facilities afforded by the arrangements of the German Post Office enabled him to do, and he was led to adopt it by the circumstance that so many sought his advice from mere curiosity, or worse motives, without any thought or intention of paying, that he was driven to the adoption of what might be an unusual but was certainly not a reprehensible plan for securing the bonafides of his patients.

A mistake he had made in his former chemical days was raked up from the limbo of forgotten things, and imputed to him as a gross crime, and a proof of his venality and dishonesty; though, in reality, the whole story rebounds to his credit. During the period when he had temporarily abandoned medicine in disgust at its uncertainty, and had devoted himself solely to chemical and literary pursuits, he fancied he had discovered a new alkali, which he denominated pneum, and which he sold to those who wished to possess it. Subsequent investigation showed him that he had committed a mistake, and that the substance he had supposed to be a perfectly new matter was nothing but borax. He hastened to acknowledge his error, and lost no time in refunding to the purchasers the money he had received for it.

He was now settled in Torgau, and perceiving that his discoveries and labours met with nothing but opposition, contempt, and neglect from his medical brethren, disdaining to reply to any of the odious calumnies that were heaped upon him by those who should have been proud of him as their countryman and colleague, he discontinued writing in their medical journals, and appealed from the injustice of his professional brethren to the unprejudiced judgment of an enlightened public, and henceforth published his strictures on ancient medicine, and his projects for its reformation, in a magazine of general literature and science, entitled the Allgemeiner Anzeiger der Deutschen. During the years 1808 and 1809, he published in that journal a succession of papers equal in terseness, vigour and originality to anything he had previously written, among which two deserve especial mention, viz., his essay On the Value of the Speculative Systems of Medicine, (Lesser Writings, p. 556.) and his touching and earnest letter to Hufeland, (Ibid, p. 581.) whom he never ceased to love and esteem, though in every respect he was a much greater man and finer character than the Nestor of German medicine, as Hufeland was called. The doctrines which were scornfully rejected by the Scribes and Pharisees of the old school found favour with the public, and the number of his admirers and non-medical disciples increased from day to day. In 1810 he published the first edition of his immortal Organon, which was an amplification and extension of his Medicine of Experience, worked up with greater care, and put into a more methodical and aphoristic form, after the model of some of the Hippocratic writings.

With a wide-spread reputation he now re-entered Leipzic, where a crowd of patients and admires flocked around him, and the flood tide of fortune seemed at length to set in towards him. Professor Hecker of Berlin wrote, in 1810, a violent diatribe against the Organon, which displays more wrath and untempered hostility than wit or good breeding, and was replied to in a vigorous manner by young Frederick Hahnemann, who undertook the defence of his father, for the latter treated all attacks, whether on his character or his works, with silent contempt; though it could not be said he viewed them with indifference, for there is every reason to believe the poisoned shafts of envy and calumny rankled in his soul and communicated acerbity to a disposition that was naturally overflowing with love to his fellow-men.

Hecker’s attack was the signal for numerous others of the same nature, written with greater or less ability and with more or less fairness; bit it would be weariness to recapitulate even the titles of the articles and pamphlets that issued from the press, (Among the most remarkable of the works hostile to homoeopathy that appeared during Hahnemann’s residence in Germany I may mention Professor Jorg’s Critische Hefte, 1822; Professor Curt Sprengel’s two essays ON Homoeopathy, 1824 and 1832; Professor Heinroth’s Anti-Organon,1835; Dr. von Wedekind’s Examination of the Homoeopathic System, 1825; Dr. C.W.Sachs’ Concluding Word on Hahnemann’s Homoeopathic System, 1826, dr. Mukisch’s Value of Homoeopathy as a Science and an Art, 1826; Hufeland’s Homoeopathy, 1826; and Simon’s Samuel Hahnemann the Pseudo- Messiah of Medicine, the diluter par excellence, &c., 1830. Some of these works, written by some of the most celebrated physicians of Germany, display a considerable amount of fairness in argument and freedom from personality; the condemnation they pronounce on homoeopathy, however, is based entirely on theoretical grounds, and no attempt is made by their authors to put the system to the test of bedside experience. Others, and especially the last, are merely personal diatribes, composed on the principle calumniare audacter, semper a liquid haerebit!)intended by their authors to crush the presumptuous innovator.

However, this was not the effect they had. Hahnemann steadily pursued his course without condescending to notice the attacks of his adversaries, and in 1811 he published the first volume of the Pure Materia Medica, which contained the pathogeneses of the medicines he had been silently testing upon himself and friends, together with the symptoms he had culled from various records of poisoning by the same substance. His earnest wish at this time was to found some college with hospital attached, for the purpose of indoctrinating the rising generation of physicians in homoeopathy, theoretically and practically;but this plan failing, he resolved to give a course of lectures upon the system to those medical men and students who wished to be instructed in it. In order to be allowed to do this, however, he had to pay a certain sum of money and defend a thesis before the Faculty of Medicine. To this regulation we are indebted for that able to essay, De Helleborismo veterum, (Lesser Writings, p.,644.) which no one can read without confessing that Hahnemann treats the subject in a masterly way, and displays an amount of acquaintance with the writings of the Greek, Latin, Arabian and other physicians, from Hippocrates down to his own time, that is possessed by few, and a power of philological criticism that has been rarely equaled.

This thesis he defended on the 26th of June, 1812, and it drew from his adversaries an unwilling acknowledgment of his learning and genius, and from the impartial and worthy Dean of the Faculty a strong expression of admiration. When a candidate defends his thesis, he has what are called opponents among the examiners, who dispute the various opinions broached in the thesis; but the most of Hahnemann’s opponents were schooled into such an amiable state of mind by this display of learning, that they hastened to confess they were entirely of his way of thinking, while a few, who wished to say something for form’s sake, merely expressed their dissent from some of Hahnemann’s philological views. Their trial, which his enemies had faint hoped would end in an exposure of the ignorance of the shallow charlatan, triumphantly proved the superiority of Hahnemann over his opponents, even on their own territory, and was a brilliant inauguration of the lectures which he forthwith commenced to deliver to a circle of admiring students and grey-headed old doctors, whom the fame of his doctrines and his learning attracted round him. He lectured twice a week, and from among the followers who gathered round him he selected a number to assist him in the labours of proving medicines, which he pursued without intermission.

The vast amount of self-sacrifice, devotion, and endurance these labours must have required from him, those only who have attempted to prove medicines can form any idea of.

During his residence in Leipzic, from 1810 to 1821, he from time to time published valuable essays in the literary journal, I have already alluded to one of which was on deadly form of typhus that broke out in 1814, (Lesser Writings. p. 712.) in consequence of the disturbances caused by the stupendous military operations of that period, more particularly by the disorderly retreat of the French army from Russia. And he departed on one occasion from his usual habit, and wrote a couple of controversial articles upon the treatment of burns, (Ibid, p. 710), for which he recommended warm applications in opposition to Professor Dzondi, who had advised the employment of cold water. A second edition of the Organon and five more volumes of the Materia Medica appeared during this period, adding at once to his fame and to the perfection of his system, which began to attract the attention of many physicians and immense numbers of the educated and upper classes.

R.E. Dudgeon
Robert Ellis Dudgeon 1820 – 1904 Licentiate of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh in 1839, Robert Ellis Dudgeon studied in Paris and Vienna before graduating as a doctor. Robert Ellis Dudgeon then became the editor of the British Journal of Homeopathy and he held this post for forty years.
Robert Ellis Dudgeon practiced at the London Homeopathic Hospital and specialised in Optics.
Robert Ellis Dudgeon wrote Pathogenetic Cyclopaedia 1839, Cure of Pannus by Innoculation, London and Edinburgh Journal of Medical Science 1844, Hahnemann’s Organon, 1849, Lectures on the Theory & Practice of Homeopathy, 1853, Homeopathic Treatment and Prevention of Asiatic Cholera 1847, Hahnemann’s Therapeutic Hints 1847, On Subaqueous Vision, Philosophical Magazine, 1871, The Influence of Homeopathy on General Medical Practice Since the Death of Hahnemann 1874, Repertory of the Homeopathic Materia Medica, 2 vols 1878-81, The Human Eye Its Optical Construction, 1878, Hahnemann’s Materia Medica Pura, 1880, The Sphygmograph, 1882, Materia Medica: Physiological and Applied 1884, Hahnemann the Founder of Scientific Therapeutics 1882, Hahnemann’s Organon 1893 5th Edition, Prolongation of Life 1900, Hahnemann’s Lesser Writing.