Hahnemann

Samuel Christian Fredrick Hahnemann’s birth anniversary falls on April 10. He was born in 1755; he died in 1843. An to describe Hahnemann and his impression on the modern medical world epitomises our endeavour to learn and propagate the teachings of the great medical iconoclast.

Hahnemann started a movement called homeopathy. The movement was so powerful, that it rocked the edifices of the then medical ideology and left an impression much deeper than any one could have imagined. Hahnemann did more than just introduce homoeopathy. He shaped the way in which the medical world would perceive forever the fundamentals of health. It was through his teachings and application that one could realise the significance of a safe cure and the body’s innate capacity to heal itself.

It is clear from the many changes in allopathic practice (1800 to 1900) that Hahnemann’s critique must have gone deep into the heart of allopathy. Allopathy reduced its high doses and moved to simpler mixtures of drugs as the century progressed. The allopaths of the time even adopted many of the drugs proved and introduced by Hahnemann and regularly used in homeopathy. The system then moved to single drugs and abandoned its distressing practices by 1900. In many ways allopathy stole Hahnemann’s ideas and brought the two sects closer together. By 1900, it was harder to distinguish between them in the medical marketplace. Undoubtedly, this worked out to the advantage of the allopaths.

Homeopathy, the whole movement, began as a medical heresy – as a deviation from the accepted medical teachings (group norms) of allopathy. It began as rejection of the accepted medical ideology of the day. Hahnemann received the usual treatment meted out to any other heretic in history – ridicule, ostracism and emphatic expulsion from the group of the medical peers. He spent the rest of his life on the margins of medicine as a deviantised heretic. His work consisted very clearly of this combined disenchantment with and rejection of allopathy, and the gradual construction of a new medical identity or ideology, which would serve as the uniquely new norms for a new medical movement. Hahnemann did not start with a complete new system developed overnight in the twinkling of an eye. He had to create it painfully – piece by piece. He started with a profound disenchantment with allopathy and then launched into increasingly vociferous attacks upon its more barbaric practices.

Then he began to formulate, through his own research and experimentation, definite medical ideas, or what we today might regard as “glimpses of the full system”. He was in a difficult position to begin with and proceeded with caution as it is one thing to criticise something but quite another to have a better alternative. He most certainly did not have an alternative, initially, but he pretty soon formulated the bare bones of one.

Category: Homeopathy