The jealousy of his professional brethren, however, led them to incite the privileged guild of apothecaries to play the same game that had proved so successful in expelling Hahnemann from other places, and their machinations were only stayed for a time by the arrival in Leipzic of the celebrated Austrian Field Marshal, Prince Schwarzenberg, who came thither avowedly with the design of placing himself under Hahnemann’s care, as his wife was despaired of by the first practitioners of the old school. At first considerable amendment ensued, but his disease, which was some organic affection of the brain or heart, eventually had a fatal termination.
Of course a cry was now got up that Hahnemann’s method hastened if it did not actually cause the death of the illustrious commander, and the apothecaries, taking advantage of the unpopularity which this catastrophe, and the mode in. which it was “improved” by his medical brethren, cast upon Hahnemann, found now little difficulty in obtaining an injunction against his dispensing his own medicines.
Hahnemann could not write prescriptions for his medicines, seeing that the privileged apothecaries did not keep them and could not be trusted with their preparation, as they were his bitterest foes. His practice was therefore gone, and though he was urgently advised to dispense his medicines secretly, yet he had too great a respect for the authority of the law to act contrary to the verdict of those whose business it was to enforce it, even although he believed that they misinterpreted its spirit. Nothing was left for him therefore but to quit Leipzic, a town which was now endeared to him by many pleasing associations connected with the development of his great reform, and his fatherland, Saxony, now offered no place where the most illustrious of its sons could live in peace.
Under these discouraging circumstances the reigning prince of Anhalt Coethen, who was an ardent admirer of the system, offered Hahnemann an asylum in the tiny capital of his tiny dominions, and accordingly to Coethen Hahnemann proceeded in 1821. It must have been with a heavy heart that he left Leipzic, the goal of his youth’s ambition and the scene of his manhood’s triumphs. It must have cost him a pang to leave that dear fatherland, for which he had always sighed in all his wanderings. To exchange the busy commercial and literary capital of northern Germany for the lifeless and dismal little town of a petty principality was but a sorry exchange indeed; and the deserted ill-paved streets and rude environs of the provincial town were a poor compensation for the lively and frequented promenades round Leipzic, where he was wont to walk every afternoon with his portly wife and numerous family. Though Leipzic has now the honour of containing his bronze effigies, and though Leipzic’s magistrates and municipal authorities joined in the inauguration of Hahnemann’s monument in 1851, this will hardly suffice to efface the stain of bigotry and intolerance that attaches to the town and its authorities by their expulsion of the greatest of Leipzic’s citizen’s in 1821.
The favour of the Duke, who appointed him Hofrath and physician in ordinary to his serene person and court, could scarcely make up to Hahnemann for the loss of the disciples whom he used to instruct and the friends who used to assist him in provings; and his habits, which had never been very sociable, now became more than ever retired. After settling at Coethen he seldom crossed the threshold of his door except to visit his patron when he was sick; all the other patients who flocked to Coethen for his advice he was at his own house, and his only walks were in a little garden at the back of his house, which he used jocularly to observe, though very narrow was infinitely high. Here he daily promenaded for a certain time as regularly as he had done in the pleasant leipzic alleys, and every fine day he used to take a drive in his carriage into the country. He devoted himself entirely to practice and the development of his system. His amazing industry and perseverance never flagged an instant; he worked incessantly; it might be said. Here he published a third, a fourth, and a fifth edition of his Organon and a second and third edition of his Materia Medica, each time with great additions and careful revisions. Here also he wrote many articles for the literary journey before alluded to.
In 1827 he summoned to Coethen his two oldest and most esteemed disciples, Drs. Stapf and Gross, and communicated to them his theory of the origin of chronics disease and his discovery of a completely new series of medicaments for their cure, exhorting them to test the reality of his opinions and discoveries in their own practice. The next year the first and second volumes of his celebrated work in Chronic Disease, their peculiar nature and homoeopathic treatment, appeared. The doctrines therein inculcated were not received with implicit faith by all his disciples, for whilst some professed to perceive in them a discovery equal if not superior to that of the homoeopathic therapeutic law, others were not satisfied that the deductions arrived at were justified by the facts on which they were professedly based. To Hahnemann’s opponents his doctrine of chronic diseases was a fertile and inexhaustible theme for ridicule and obloquy, which he as usual paid no attention to, though his followers had now become so numerous that they began to take up the cudgels in their master’s defence, and the medical press of Germany groaned with polemical articles respecting homoeopathy from both sides, of more or less ability. Since the year 1822 the homoeopathists had a quarterly journal, that contained many able and vigorous articles in support of Hahnemann’s doctrines. A third, a fourth, and a fifth volume of the Chronic Diseases, containing extensive and valuable provings of new medicines, successively appeared during the following two years. The value of these works can scarcely be over-estimated, and they, with the Materia Medica, constitute the inexhaustible treasury on which the homoeopathic practitioner draws for the cure and relief of many diseases in which the allopathic appliances are impotent or hurtful.
On the 10th August, 1829, a large concourse of his disciples and admires assembled at coethen, for the purpose of celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of his reception of the Doctor’s degree, and the dull little town was enlivened for a moment by the festivities of which it was the scene. The same day Hahnemann solemnly founded the first Homoeopathic Society, under the name of the “Central Society of German Homoeopathists,” which exists and flourishes to this day, and by whose exertions it was that the bronze statue was last year (1851) erected at Leipzic, as a grateful memento to tits illustrious founder. (I may, without boasting, take to myself the credit of having been the means of inducing the managing committee to erect the statue at Leipzic in place of Coethen. At the meeting of the Central Society at Liegnitz, in 1850, on its being formally announced that all the necessary arrangements had been made for the erectio, of he statue of Coethen, I spoke strongly against the plan, contending that Coethen was a most inappropriate place, being but a shabby, fifth-rate town, with which Hahnemann was only accidentally connected, and pointing to Meissen, Hahnemann’s birth-place, or Leipzic, the scene of his foundation of the homoeopathic school, and the head-quarters of homoeopathy, as much more suitable localities.
I was told that the arrangements could not be altered, as the municipality of Coethen and the reigning Duke had contributed funds and a site for the erector, of the monument in Coethen, and the committee had not money to meet the additional expense that a change of locality would entail. On my return to England, I wrote a strong remonstrance to the committee against this selection of Coethen as the site of Hahnemann’s statue, and I moved the Homoeopathic Congress that met at Cheltenham is September to address the committee on the subject. This was done, and shortly afterwards I had agreed to reopen the question of the site of the statue, and he had little doubt but that the views of the English homoeopathists would meet with favorable consideration; but he stated that the funds of the committee would not suffice to meet the additional expenditure entailed by a change of locality, and that if a change were made, they would look to their English colleagues for some additional subscriptions.
I at once consented to raise some more money in England for this object, and succeeded in collecting the necessary funds among my homoeopathic colleagues. The effect of reopening the question was as I had anticipated. One and all condemned the original locality of Coethen, and the majority of votes were in favour of Leipzic, provided leave could be obtained from the authorities to raise the statue in that town. This was readily granted; a beautiful spot of ground was generously given by the municipal authorities, and the statue of Hahnemann adorns the town which witnessed the dawn and triumph of his great discovery; and his fatherland, Saxony, which persecuted and expelled him when alive, is saved the further disgrace of seeing the monument of its illustrious son erected in a foreign state.
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.