If you ask practicing homeopaths about details from the life of the great founder and paragon of their profession, Samuel Hahnemann, you quickly get a flood of facts and stories that have been collected and passed on as anecdotes. His love of traveling and his always present readiness for quarreling are among the things always mentioned that give us a picture of an unpleasant grumbler whom his contemporaries would rather see from afar. On the other side, we have the picture of the luminous prophet with a messianic mission who appears to have received his Organon as divine revelation.
Both of these pictures, however, do not do Hahnemann justice and serve more to romanticize than to elucidate his principles. In order to get to the core of his message, we must first occupy ourselves more intensely with the circumstances of his life. It is not my intention to write a new biography here, but rather to shed light on certain aspects of his life that are important for the understanding the whole of it.
Take first Hahnemann's position as doctor. From today's perspective, we tend to always associate with this the picture of the good-natured country doctor or perhaps a professor in a rural clinic. In any case it is the figure of a doctor of our times who is well-versed in his medicine and could find the answer to any question should he not have it immediately. The doctor of the 18 th century was more akin to a barber surgeon or a Feldscher (?) than to an academically educated scientist. The medicine of this age was still in its infancy and was concerned more with collecting symptoms than with treating them.
The theory of “destructive juices,” which were supposed to be the cause of disruption to the body's inner balance, was still accepted. So it was logical, and this was the understanding of the day, to employ bloodletting as a purposeful therapy. The weakening of the patient called forth through the often life-threatening loss of blood was not attributed to the therapy but to the course of his illness. Most of time, with hopeless diseases, this method led to a shortening of the period of suffering even if the doctor had no idea of what was really happening. Contagious diseases were not treated; rather the patient was isolated and left to his fate. Protection of the community was placed above the convalescence of the individual.
The medications of this time were also more than questionable. The Drecksapotheke of the Middle Ages with its disgusting animal parts or secretions gave way to a treatment with poisons in various degrees of concentration. This was the century of treatment with arsenic and mercury. The conviction was that the mild poisoning would not kill the patient, but only the illness.
The foundation of the entire medical approach was not precise observations and their connection to the insights of other branches of knowledge, but instead rather bizarre ideas that today make your hair stand on end. The specific thoughts of natural medicine, alchemy and astrology were mixed together into a brew of half-truths that even today is difficult to separate out again.
In a time, however, that had no knowledge of the existence of microorganisms, paths of infection or metabolic processes and their functioning, even the wildest claims were seen as acceptable explanations if they even halfway agreed with one or two facts. Diseases could be divided into two groups: harmless diseases that healed despite whatever the doctor did and serious diseases whose lethal course was only accelerated by the doctors. Treatment by letting someone die and isolation were the normal therapy for serious diseases.
In this age Hahnemann began his trade. He was also one of these helpless doctors whom we would call charlatans and quacks today. His great service here, however, was the recognition of this state of emergency and the resulting personal consequence: he refused to “heal” his patients. He had understood that every attempt at healing that he or his medical colleagues undertook was actually completely meaningless and even dangerous. He wanted to help his patients more by keeping the doctors away from them. In turning away from the medical profession, he placed himself squarely against the guild and his immediate surroundings. Being a doctor in these times was also quite lucrative. The number of patients in a community were divided among the available doctors and cautiously guarded.
Anyone who left the trade guild became an outsider. At the same time, because he was privy to inside information, he was liable to being suspected of betrayal. The safest thing to do was to leave the place where this happened, settle somewhere else where one was still unknown and begin a new trade there. Hahnemann became a tutor and a translator. This is as if today a well-respected cardiologist would suddenly become a taxi driver. Two hundred years ago, however, the medical training was not so specialized that the doctor could not also work in areas that seemingly had nothing to do with medicine.
Tutors did not just have the simple task of teaching the children of the wealthy how to read their name and how to check simple calculations in restaurants. Rather they undertook to impart a universal education in all fields of knowledge – scientific, philosophical and cultural. The tutor was relatively poorly paid when you think of the amount of time required but, considering the free room and the social contacts that could be later put to good use, it was nonetheless attractive enough.
This activity created an economic basis and provided enough freedom to be able to follow other interests. For Hahnemann, these were his work as translator and his own research in the field of medicine. He did not translate novels or travel descriptions that would have reached a broad public. He focused rather on scientific publications from the English-speaking part of the world. The differences in accomplishments between states and universities in Europe of the 18 th century seem unimaginable today. Universities in the German-speaking countries still based their highly classified courses of study on the medieval curriculums, whereas in France and England space for new ideas had long been created. At the same time the ability of the elite academician to speak a foreign language was not greatly developed. Discoveries that had been made in England were in part unwillingly repeated decades later on the continent because no one had read the publications.
Occupying himself with the most current knowledge of his time is thus the most important point in Hahnemann's development. He was curious – as are most people – but he was not afraid of something new. He was even prepared to spread the news of recent findings making them accessible to others. In so doing he preserved the originality of the author, which with many discoveries of this time was not the case. A researcher would simply “discover” the content of the foreign articles again “for the first time” conveniently forgetting about the original source. Through his translating work, Hahnemann encountered new aspects of medicine, ones that lead into modern times. The legendary Cinchona experiment is a prime example: Here a disease is treated with a medicine that is not in the classical sense a poison and still it heals.
But what is typical for the time is the use of Cinchona by the local doctors: They used it with their patients not only in the treatment of malaria, but also for everything else they could think of. In this manner, the use of Cinchona again became arbitrary and indiscriminate and thus also dangerous.
There is, however, one aspect of the treatment with poisons, which Hahnemann learned at the university, that he adopted: the question of the principle of equality.
The symptoms of a poisoning were known to all of the doctors through direct observation of their own treatment. In order to make these less severe, they gradually reduced the concentration until no more acute symptoms were visible. They remained, however, at easily measurable concentrations that eventually led to chronic poisoning. Hahnemann turned his attention to both the symptoms of illness and to poisoning and had an idea: If a substance in a high concentration is capable of producing the same symptoms as a disease, then in unimagineably small concentrations, it would become the exact opposite and would cancel out the same symptoms when these appear in an illness.
While testing the simile principle, he embarked into realms of unusually high dilutions (low amounts of original substance) and obtained the well-known unusual results. At the same time he reached two other conclusions. He determined that new theories are sensitive to criticism and that the production of medicines by pharmacists is mostly a matter of luck.
There may have been many honorable members of the pharmacy profession of this time, but there were certainly also many swindlers. In order to ensure the safety of the therapy, the activity of the physician and the production of medicine had been divided into two separate professions for many centuries. This led, however, to one depending upon the other and a mutual understanding of what each was doing was generally very limited. At the same time it was impossible to control what was being produced. Under these conditions, it was tempting to cut back on work procedures and to use cheaper substances. Because medicine was ineffective or damaging anyway, it didn't make any difference…. Hahnemann was thus forced to learn this trade as well, at least for the sake of his own practice. In the process he also took issue with this profession, for he now knew their practices and could not stand behind them.
Through his contacts with others in his profession and university lecturers as well as through his translating work, he quickly noticed that every new theory stood in opposition to traditional academic opinion. These traditions were most often very vehemently defended against rivals by the established teachers and new theories were strictly rejected. Two hundred years ago, scientific disputes were not founded upon precise presentations and reproducible measurements that could lay the basis for a consensus, but rather upon philosophical interpretations and direct personal animosities. Dogma counted for more than actual observations.
Hahnemann warded off every objection and also refused to incorporate any foreign ideas into his fledgling theory. It was natural for him to develop a certain propensity for squabbling for, without this, he would never had been able to defend his theories. Without the massive spurning of every foreign suggestion or objection, homeopathy would never have survived its first year.
As soon as this critical phase had passed, there began the phase of consolidation. The existing knowledge was now formulated in writing and distributed. Hahnemann was soon no longer a lone warrior, but the guru of a growing community of supporters. It was necessary to lay the foundations for the common work in the written form. The decision the write the Organon in paragraphs was a masterful and at the same time restrictive idea.
Paragraphs ensure the precise reading of a text and prevent mistakes and deviations. At the same time, they are a rigid clamp that makes it very difficult to integrate improvements or innovations.
Normally, one would have expected Hahnemann to simply describe his experimental procedures, to give a presentation of the conclusions gained from his observations, and to venture an interpretation supported by citations from the professional literature. At his time, however, there was no scientific literature to draw from. The alchemical writings of the Middle Ages did lead towards modern chemistry, but his contemporaries were suspicious of these.
By using paragraphs, Hahnemann wanted to bolster his position and create an independent basis for his science. Because there was no other literature on this subject available, his experimental procedures needed to be standardized in order for the remedy provings to be of any scientific value when collated. Hahnemann tested about 100 remedies according to these principles and his students tested a few more during his lifetime. All of the conclusions of the Organon are based upon these few remedies with no further information having been added.
The therapy was also structured in a drawn-out manner for the results of the therapy disturb the standardized experimental process and ruin the new remedy provings. Long periods of time were needed in order to make precise observations of the effects of a remedy. The actual physical reaction to a remedy was always much more protracted than its effect on the patient's awareness. An acute pain can be removed in a matter of seconds by the correct homeopathic remedy, but the elimination of the actual physical causes takes much longer.
Thus, Hahnemann faced a decisive problem: What is the effect of a remedy and what are its repercussions? Today we are a bit cleverer for we have the knowledge of the last 200 years to fall back on. For Hahnemann, however, every remedy was new and strange. Today we can practically predict the course of a healing, whereas he needed a long period of observation and evaluation. In the following editions of the Organon , Hahnemann focuses less and less on the material phenomena and asks the question as to the nature of disease itself.
This resulted in an incongruity between the various editions that makes a direct comparison between them nearly impossible. With each edition Hahnemann transformed further from a materially working, somewhat fearful practitioner to a knowledgeable therapist who worked immaterially. When you consider that this change from a doctor that practiced homeopathy to a homeopath working as a doctor took place in just a few decades, it is easy to imagine that this process of investigation certainly must have continued on.
All throughout his life, Hahnemann made changes in leaps and bounds. He moved from being a medieval doctor to a comparative scientist to a pharmacist. He traveled through Europe and could see “over the edge” of its boundaries. He never incorporated ideas from others directly into his work, but collected them and evaluated them at length. It is understandable that some of these ideas would be integrated into the Organon, for it is difficult to simply suppress knowledge even if comes to one externally. If a fact seemed to fit to homeopathy, Hahnemann processed it and built it into the existing theory. He did not just adopt something, but tested it for its meaningfulness and usefulness.
So would he have had, as did his students and their successors, much enthusiasm for a multitude of varied ideas and interdisciplinary insights. He would be just as eclectic today as he was when he gathered the then current knowledge of 200 years ago. Classical homeopathy is therefore, as the heritage of Hahnemann, a path of homeopathic knowledge that continues forever onwards.
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