No book dealing with Homoeopathy would be complete without a sketch of the life and works of the founder of this system of therapeutics. We can do little within the compass of such an article, but state the facts, the accomplishments of this great physician. Numerous biographies have been written, chief among which is the biography of Hahnemann by Dr. Richard Haehl of Stuttgart, in two volumes, which is a remarkable study of original sources and a faithful reproduction of medical life and thought at that time.
Hahnemann lived in a restless age. Old and established dogmas, religion, philosophy and science were questioned and with this came doubt and change. Political institutions were shaken at their foundations. Men talked of liberty, of freedom of thought and action, in all departments of human endeavor.
In the very midst of these iconoclastic forces lived Hahnemann who, notwithstanding the outward serenity of his work, was most actively engaged in this destructive but at the same time constructive effort. And all this without entering politics, religion, or philosophy. He saw clearly that it was the practice of medicine more than any other department that needed reformation and teaching along new lines.
Medicine in Hahnemann’s time was in a chaotic state. Baseless theories, dogmatically taught, deducted without observation or experiment – these ruled and formed the bases of equally fantastic therapeutics.
Well might Hahnemann, born into this state of things, exclaim : ” The evil has become so crying that nothing but the fiery zeal of a rock-firm Martin Luther is needed to sweep away the monstrous leaven.” But, regarding this, we must remember that the practice of medicine then was a far different thing from what it is today.
Hahnemann was born at Meissen, near Dresden, on the tenth day of April, 1755. His father was a painter of porcelain, a worthy and thoughtful man who from the very first endeavored to teach his son the value of thought. This inquiring attitude was a very early habit with young Hahnemann and it is this tendency to original thought which is the most characteristic attribute of his future professional career.
Hahnemann craved classical education which his father could not afford but his teacher who had seen in the boy a promise other than porcelain painting interceded and satisfied the father’s pride by letting the boy earn his tuition. And so, we find the astonishing fact that in his twelfth year he was entrusted to impart to his classmates the rudiments of the Greek language.
Hahnemann was singularly fortunate in his teachers and the sound basis on which he pursued his studies may be inferred from his own words, “I was allowed freedom in the choice of my subject-I was less solicitous about reading than about digesting what was read and to classify it in my mind before reading further.” Early in 1775, he went to Leipsic where he supported himself by giving instruction in German and French and by translating English books. After many hardships, he received a degree of M.D., in 1779.
He now practiced in different towns but finally moved to Leipsic in order to be nearer the center of learning. Later, the accepted charge of an institution for mental diseases at Georgenthal where his successful handling and humane treatment of the inmates attracted much attention. During this time, he did much original work in chemistry, edited a great book, ” The Apothecaries’ Lexicon.” and was spoken of as ” this celebrated chemist,” ” One whom chemistry has to thank for many important discoveries.” Another contemporary, in 1826 says : “Hahnemann is recognized as a good chemist, and has won for himself unfading laurels by his preparation of Mercurius solubilis and by his treatise on arsenical poisoning.”
In 1784, five years after obtaining his degree, he published a very practical and original work, ” On the Treatment of Chronic Ulcers,” which was highly praised in the medical periodicals of the time. This book is remarkable for the excellence of its hygienic rules. His observations on exercise, recreation, clothing, diet, pure air, his minute and careful directions in regard to the external use of cold water, were a long way in advance of the writing of his contemporaries and quite up to the mark of the more modern treatises on hygiene. In this, his first medical work, he regrets the absence of any guiding principle for discovering the curative powers of medicine. This shows the bent of his mind, and for the next ten or twelve years, his mind was much exercised with the endeavor to discover such a principle.
In 1789, he published a work, ” Instruction to Surgeons Concerning the Treatment of Veneral Diseases,” which also had a most favorable reception. One reviewer speaks of it as “A profound and clear work.” Another, ” This is no ordinary work, but is written with an unusual degree of knowledge, reflection and original thought.” The German medical journals at this period have frequent references to him as a capable physician of widely extended fame. And Hufeland, the leading physician of that day, speaks of him as “one of the most distinguished physicians of Germany, a physician of mature experience and reflection.”
This was the pre-Homoeopathic Hahnemann-a man of large practice, great learning, one who had made a name for himself as a capable physician and scientific investigator. He had gained the respect of classical scholars, of hospital physicians and surgeons, of men of literature, of some of the first physicians of his time. He was acquainted with almost every ancient and modern language, with the literature of the medical profession of his own and ancient times. He was a great chemist, a good mineralogist and botanist, a sanitarian and an experienced, practical physician – an all-round scientific man.
This practically finished Hahnemann’s active career as a practitioner before his discovery of the law of cure. Possessing every advantage of medical and surgical knowledge as then understood, yet his disgust with current medical practice grew with his experience and what success he had was unquestionable due to the high order of hygiene ordered and strong common sense, there being no surgery in the modern sense to fall back on and no collateral sciences to harbor such malcontents as he. The practice of medicine such as then existed could not keep him. He fell back upon his chemical studies. These together with translations of works on chemistry and medicine gave him sufficient to maintain an existence.
We have reached an important epoch in his life in order to understand which it is necessary to bear in mind that the brilliant capabilities of Hahnemann were joined also to a sensitive, religious nature with a high professional ideal far above that of the common practitioner-an ideal and a sense of duty as keen and stern as that of a puritan settler. For this reason, he could not practice that which he did not believe but he went on with his reading and earned a living by translations.
It was when translating Cullen’s Materia Medica in 1790 that the birth of the thought occurred that marks a new era in his life and also indeed in medical practice. Hahnemann did not immediately write about this, but six years of constant study, experiment, and practical application followed. Then in the leading medical periodical of the day, Hufeland’s Journal, he published an essay, “On a New Principle for Ascertaining the Curative Properties of Drugs.” That historic essay marks the birth of Homoeopathy.
In this essay, Hahnemann promulgates his conclusion thus : “Every powerful medicinal substance produces in the human body a peculiar kind of disease-the more powerful the medicine, the more peculiar, marked, and violent the disease. We should imitate nature, which sometimes cures a chronic disease by superadding another, and employ in the disease we wish to cure that medicine which is able to produce another very similar artificial disease, and the former will be cured, similia similibus.”
At this time, when his essay was published, Hahnemann was a physician of the highest standing and repute which no one then thought of questioning. He was in the very prime of life, in his forty-second year, fully equipped for his future work, and, it might be observed also for the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” His proposition was so radical and revolutionary that naturally it created much opposition.
The publication of the “Organon” in 1810 was a systematic elucidation of this new method of medical treatment to which Hahnemann had given the name Homoeopathy. This book aroused a storm of opposition not so much on account of the tenets therein contained but because in this book Hahnemann mercilessly criticized the then universal practice of bleeding and his advocation of small doses of single drugs immediately aligned every practicing apothecary against him and Homoeopathy-a condition which has lasted for obvious reason ever since.
In spite of this, the Organon of Hahnemann was the first step to an enlightened therapeutics. It is the constitution of Homoeopathy-subject to amendments in certain phases even as Hahnemann amended it in later editions. But the fundamental principles of this great work, founded on pure experiment, are true for all time and are only now beginning to be appreciated.
American homeopath - Ann Arbor - Michigan.
Son of William Boericke.
Books:
A Compend of the Principles of Homeopathy.
Homoeopathy