The origins of homeopathy

A bark, a bitter cup, and a quiet idea.

In 1790, in a small study in Saxony, a disillusioned doctor swallowed a spoonful of the medicine he was translating and changed the way part of the world thinks about healing. This is the story of how homeopathy began, and why it still matters two centuries on.

I. The doctor who stopped practising

Samuel Hahnemann walked away from medicine.

Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann was born in Meissen in 1755, the son of a porcelain painter, and qualified as a physician in 1779. He was brilliant, restless and fluent in a dozen languages, and within a few years of practising he had grown sick at heart of the medicine of his day. Bloodletting, purging, blistering and heroic doses of mercury and arsenic left his patients weaker than their illnesses did.

So he stopped. To feed his growing family he turned to translating medical texts, and it was in that quiet work, rather than at a bedside, that the idea arrived.

Samuel Hahnemann, lithograph, Paris, c. 1835–1841.

II. The cinchona experiment, 1790

Like cures like.

Translating William Cullen's Materia Medica, Hahnemann came to the entry on Peruvian bark, cinchona, the source of quinine and the standard treatment for malaria. Cullen explained its power by its bitterness. Hahnemann didn't believe it; plenty of bitter things did nothing for fever. So he did something few physicians of the age would have thought to do. He took the medicine himself, in health, and watched.

Within hours he felt the chills, the thirst, the flushed heat and the aching limbs of an intermittent fever. When he stopped, the symptoms faded. When he took the bark again, they returned. A substance that could cause the picture of malaria in a healthy person, it seemed, could relieve it in a sick one.

"Similia similibus curentur." Let like be cured by like.

It was not an entirely new thought. Hippocrates had written of it, and so had Paracelsus. But Hahnemann was the first to test it, patiently, on himself and then on volunteers, one substance at a time, recording every symptom. He called these trials provings, and they became the foundation of a new materia medica.

III. The softest touch

Smaller doses, stronger effects.

The early remedies were harsh. Many of the substances Hahnemann tested were poisons in ordinary amounts, and even where they worked, patients suffered an initial aggravation before they improved. His answer was to dilute, and then to dilute again, shaking the vial vigorously between each step, a process he called potentisation.

What he found ran against every instinct of the age: the more he diluted, the gentler and, in his patients' experience, the more precise the remedies became. The thunderstorm gave way to the morning dew. In 1810 he set the whole system down in the Organon of the Healing Art, a book still in print, and gave it a name from the Greek: homoios, similar, and pathos, suffering.

IV. Out into the world

From a Saxon study to 250 million people.

1755Meissen, Saxony

Samuel Hahnemann is born. He will qualify in medicine in 1779 and, disillusioned, largely abandon practice within a decade.

1790The cinchona proving

Translating Cullen, Hahnemann takes Peruvian bark himself and observes the symptoms of intermittent fever. The principle of similars is born.

1796The first essay

He publishes "Essay on a New Principle for Ascertaining the Curative Powers of Drugs", the paper generally taken as the birth of homeopathy.

1810The Organon

The first edition of the Organon of the Healing Art sets out the system. Hahnemann will revise it five more times over his life.

1831Cholera in Europe

Homeopaths report markedly lower death rates during the cholera epidemics, and the approach spreads rapidly through Germany, Austria, France and Britain.

1835Paris

Hahnemann marries the painter Mélanie d'Hervilly and moves to Paris, where he practises to a crowded waiting room until his death in 1843.

1869Australia

The Melbourne Homoeopathic Hospital is founded, one of the first in the southern hemisphere, and homeopathy takes root in the colonies.

1991Mt Barker, South Australia

Natural Aid begins hand-making homeopathic remedies in the Adelaide Hills, carrying the same quiet idea into Australian homes.

TodayA global tradition

The World Health Organization recognises homeopathy as one of the world's most widely used forms of traditional and complementary medicine, with an estimated 250 million people using it.