Homoeopathy
Homoeopathic History - Samuel Hahnemann
Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843), the German doctor who founded Homoeopathy, became disillusioned with the current medical practices of his time (such as the use of purgatives and bleeding).
This eventually led him to the belief that the answers to disease must lie in Nature. He expressed his understanding thus: “The Author of all good, when He allowed diseases to injure His offspring, must have laid down a means by which those torments might be lessened or removed.”
Like the ancient writers such as Paracelsus, Hahnemann observed that the symptoms which various substances produced in a healthy individual could be used as a guide in the selection of that same substance to act curatively in a sick individual.
This understanding enabled him to develop what is known as The Law of Similars which is the cornerstone of homœopathic philosophy. It is well-expressed in the name Homoeopathy derived from the Greek words: ‘homoios’ [similar] and ‘pathos’, [suffering] meaning ‘[the cure] is like the disease’. Hahnemann referred to conventional medicine as Allopathy, meaning ‘[the cure] is unrelated to the disease.’
Unlike western medical tradition, Homoeopathy never reduces the body down to a collection of disparate parts each treatable in isolation. The current western medical model espouses the Cartesian maxim: “The whole is the sum of its parts.” It is, therefore, a mechanical and reductionist model opposed to the notion of Holism which recognises that each part and every creature is not only an entity in its own right, but is also an integral part of larger and larger systems.