LIFE STORY OF "FATHER OF HOMEOPATHY"
Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann was a German physician best known for creating a system of alternative medicine called "Homeopathy". Hahnemann was born on 10 April 1755 in Meissen, Saxony near Dresden. His father was a painter and designer of porcelain, for which the town of Meissen is famous.
As a young man Hahnemann became proficient in a number of languages including English, French, Italian, Greek and Latin. He finally became a translator and teacher of languages gaining further proficiency in Arabic, Syriac, Chaldaic and Hebrew.
Hahnemann studied medicine for two years at Leipzig. Giving reason for lack of clinical facilities at Leipzig,he moved to Vienna, where he studied for ten months.After one term of further study, he graduated MD at the University of Erlangen on 10 August 1779 qualifying with honors. In 1781 Hahnemann took a position od doctor in the copper-mining area of Mansfeld, Saxony.Hahnemann was dissatisfied with the state of medicine in his time.
He claimed that the medicine he had been taught to practice sometimes did the patient more harm than good-"My sense of duty would not easily allow me to treat the unknown pathological state of my suffering brethren with these unknown medicines.The thought of becoming in this way a murderer towards the life of my fellow human beings was most terrible to me, so terrible and disturbing that I wholly gave up my practice in the first years of my married life and devoted myself with chemistry and writing."
After giving up his practice around 1784, Hahnemann made his living as a writer and translator and started investigating the causes of medicine's alleged errors.While translating William Cullen's "A Treatise on the Materia Medica" Hahnemann encountered the claim that cinchona, the bark of a Peruvian tree was effective in treating malaria because of its astringency. Hahnemann believed that other astringent substances are not effective against malaria and began to research cinchona's effect on the human body by self-application. Noting that the drug induced malaria-like symptoms in himself he concluded that it would do so in any healthy individual. This led him to postulate a healing principle: "that which can produce a set of symptoms in a healthy individual can treat a sick individual who is showing a similar set of symptoms.
This principle, like cures like, became the basis for an approach to medicine which he gave the name "Homeopathy".
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