An introduction to Homeopathy

Last year we celebrated the bi-centenary of the publication, in 1810, of Samuel Hahnemann’s first complete version of his thoughts and approaches to health and disease. The Organon, translated into English, in 1811, was the culmination of his meticulous observational methodology as a chemist and a physician.  His own objection to the reliance on drugs was a result of his experiences during his time working as a physician in Germany.  Appalled by the often life threatening effects of the drugs at his disposal, he strove to find a gentle, more effective and less harmful way to approach disease.  

The complete writings of Hahnemann form the bedrock of homeopathy today. His published work changed the way disease might be perceived, and remains both delightfully simple, elegant and controversial. He shifted the emphasis from abstract notions of what caused illness to an individual-based system of understanding diseases. Many intellectuals since Hahnemann’s time have shown equal fascination in his system of medicine, to this day new writings and research are contributing to this now substantial body of knowledge.

The simple approach to understanding how we get sick had its origins in the Hippocratic School of Medicine in ancient Greece. Two ways of healing had been ascertained as “contraries”, or “similars”. For many hundreds of years the second way, to treat “like with like” had languished and been given little attention. Hahnemann’s contribution to the development of medical science was to put together, from this original observation of similars, (often based on observations of naturally occurring reaction, e.g. snakebites [toxicity]), with his own experimentation using the pharmacological substances of the day. The significant change was to develop a means of collecting reliable information from the observation of the effects of these substances on people. Hahnemann’s knowledge of poisoning effects on different species was vast, his endeavour was to establish safe medical substances for use with human beings. The observation that substances effect ‘us’ deleteriously was turned on its head by his insight that if a substance created an illness in a healthy person it might render health to the sick person suffering a similar symptom picture. This formed the basis of trialling all the pharmacological substances, many of which were toxic. This led him to experiment with dilutions and was a key contribution to approaching illness with ‘similars’. 

His insistence that these substances should be trialled by healthy people to monitor all possible changes established a ‘sea change’ in understanding health and disease, for what emerged from these early trials was a change in the whole person, not merely the physical body. At once he established that the observable phenomena of change could be observed and then used therapeutically.

The most important change in medical thinking is directly attributable to Samuel Hahnemann; this being his realisation that illness effects the whole person. His method of taking information from his patients was all inclusive and stressed the emotional findings as much as the physical. In his writings Hahnemann shows us a compassion based medicine, and since his first complete publication his influence has continued and is today enjoying a worldwide renaissance.