A little history of homeopathy

Homeopathy was established over 200 years ago by a German doctor called Samuel Hahnemann who lived in Leipzig, Germany. Hahnemann was practicing medicine at a time when it was thought that all illness was caused by an imbalance in the four ‘humours’ of the human body. These four humours were thought to be fluids that permeate and flow through the body and influence its health.

The doctors of the time believed that in order to restore health then medical practice needed to focus on restoring balance to the four humours. This was 'achieved' through the use of practices such as bloodletting and purging, for which they used laxatives, enemas and toxic substances to make patients vomit. This sort of treatment was very stressful for people and often led to them dying. Only patients with the strongest constitutions survived the demands of the medical ‘cure’!

Hahnemann's patients also suffered under this treatment and he became disillusioned with what the medicine of the time was doing to the people that he so wanted to cure. This bothered him so much that he actually stopped practicing medicine.

After he stopped practicing he thought about illness a great deal and this led him to develop a different way of looking at disease. He saw that the symptoms of a disease told a story about the patient and that the best way to help that patient was to fully understand those symptoms and not to suppress them.

Allied to his idea of detailed observation of a patient's symptoms Hahnemann also drew upon the work of the Ancient Greek physician Hippocrates (born 460BC). In his medical practice Hippocrates observed the principle of ‘like cures like’, meaning that the symptoms of a patient's illness can be improved by administering a medicine that would create similar symptoms in a healthy person.

That sounds a bit complicated but an example might make it clearer. Some classic symptoms of hay fever are a runny nose, sore eyes and streaming tears. Now if you peel and onion you might well experience some or all of the same symptoms in a very similar way. Therefore using the ‘like cures like’ principle it is perhaps no surprise that a very common homeopathic remedy often used for hay fever is in fact made from onions. People have found that the onion-like hay fever symptoms are cancelled out when a homeopathic remedy made from onions is taken.

Hahnemann took Hippocrates’ ideas further and discovered that by diluting the medicines over and over again they were more effective and yet safer to use. Safety wasn’t an issue if your chosen medicine was onion, but Hahnemann used other substances such as mercury and arsenic, so diluting until there were miniscule amounts of the original substance left in the remedy meant that they were safe to use but still effective in curing the patient.

So in summary, Hahnemann brought together already established principles (like cures like), recognised the importance of observing the patient's symptoms and discovered the benefits of diluting remedies to make them safe but still effective. The approach and principles written down by Hahnemann over two hundred years ago continue to form the bedrock on which modern-day homeopathy is based.