Samuel Hahneman

Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann, better known as Samuel Hahnemann (Meissen, April 10, 1755 – Paris, July 2, 1843), was a Saxon physician, inventor of the system of alternative medicine called homeopathy.

Hahnemann is also credited with introducing the practice of quarantine to the Kingdom of Prussia during his service to the Duke of Anhalt-Köthe. ^{[citation required]}

Early Years

Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann was born in Meissen, Saxony, near Dresden. His father Christian Gottfried Hahnemann was a porcelain painter and designer, for which the city of Meissen is famous.

As a young man, Hahnemann became proficient in several languages, including English, French, Italian, Greek, and Latin. Over time he made a living as a translator and language teacher, becoming more proficient in Arabic, Syriac, Chaldean, and Hebrew.

Hahnemann studied medicine for two years in Leipzig. Citing Leipzig's lack of clinical facilities, he moved to Vienna where he studied for ten months.After a period of further study, he graduated in Medicine from the University of Erlangen on August 10, 1779, with honors. His poverty forced him to choose Erlangen, since school fees were lower.Hahnemann's thesis was entitled Conspectus adfectuum spasmodicorum aetiologicus etrapeuticus. [Dissertation on the causes and treatment of spasmodic diseases ]

Medical Practice

In 1781, Hahnemann took up the post of village doctor in the copper-mining area of Mansfeld, Saxony. He soon married Johanna Henriette Kuchler, with whom they eventually had eleven children. After giving up medical practice, and while working as a translator of scientific and medical textbooks, Hahnemann traveled around Saxony for many years, staying in many different cities and towns for varying periods of time, never living far from the Elbe River. He settled at different times in Dresden, Torgau, Leipzig and Köthen (Anhalt) before finally moving to Paris in June 1835.

Creation of homeopathy

Main article: Homeopathy

Hahnemann was dissatisfied with the state of medicine in his time and was particularly opposed to practices such as bloodletting. He claimed that the medicine he had been taught to practice sometimes did the patient more harm than good:

My sense of duty would not allow me to easily treat the unknown pathological state of my suffering brothers with these unknown medicines. The idea of becoming such a murderer or mischief of the life of my fellow men was the most terrible, so terrible and disturbing thing that I completely abandoned my practice in the first years of my marriage life and I was solely concerned with writing and chemistry.

After leaving his practice around 1784, Hahnemann earned his living primarily as a writer and translator.

While translating William Cullen's Treatise A Treatise on the Materia Medica, S. Hahnemann discovered that the bark of the Cinchona tree was effective for the treatment of malaria due to its astringency.

Hahnemann believed that other astringent substances were not effective against malaria and began to investigate the effect of cinchona on the human body by self-application. Noting that the drug induced malaria-like symptoms in him, he concluded that he would do so in any healthy individual. This led him to postulate a curative principle: "what can produce a set of symptoms in a healthy individual, can treat a sick individual manifesting a similar set of symptoms". basis of an approach to medicine that he called homeopathy. He first used the term homeopathy in his essay Indications for the Homeopathic Use of Medicines in Ordinary Practice published in the Journal of Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland in 1807.

Development of Homeopathy

Following the work of the Viennese physician Anton von Störck, Hahnemann tested substances to determine their effects on a healthy individual, assuming (as von Störck had claimed) that they could cure the very ailments they caused. His investigations led him to agree with von Störck that the toxic effects of ingested substances often parallel certain disease states, and his exploration of historical cases of poisoning in the medical literature further implied a "law of medicinal similars'. He later devised methods of diluting the drugs he was testing in order to mitigate their toxic effects. He claimed that these dilutions, when prepared according to his "potentiation" technique; by dilution and succussion (vigorous shaking), they were still effective in relieving the same symptoms in the sick. His more systematic experiments with dose reduction actually began around 1800-1801 when, on the basis of his "law of similars," he had begun using ipecac for the treatment of cough and belladonna for scarlet fever.

He first published an article on the homeopathic approach in a German-language medical journal in 1796. After a series of further essays, he published in 1810 "Organon of the Rational Art of Healing," over the years by four additional editions entitled The Organon of the Healing Art, the first systematic treatise and containing all his detailed instructions on the subject. A sixth edition of Organon , unpublished during his lifetime and dating from February 1842, was only published many years after his death. It consisted of a fifth Organon containing extensive handwritten annotations. The Organon is widely considered to be a recast form of an essay he published in 1806 called "The medicine of experience', which had been published in Hufeland's journal. On the Organon, Robert Ellis Dudgeon states that "it was an enlargement and extension of his "Medicine of Experience", worked with greater care and put into a more methodical and aphoristic form, according to the model of the Hippocratic writings".

Coffee disease theory

Around the turn of the 19th century, Hahnemann developed a theory, proposed in his 1803 essay On the Effects of coffee from the original observations that coffee causes many diseases. Hahnemann later abandoned the coffee theory in favor of the theory that disease is caused by psora but it has been noted that the list of conditions that Hahnemann attributed to coffee was similar to his list of conditions caused by psora.

Bust by Samuel Hahnemann of the French sculptor David d'Angers (1837).

Later Life

At the beginning of 1811 Hahnemann moved with his family to Leipzig with the intention of teaching his new medical system at the University of Leipzig. As required by the university's statutes, to become a member of the faculty he had to present and defend a thesis on a medical topic of his choosing. On June 26, 1812, Hahnemann submitted a thesis in Latin, titled "A Medical Historical Dissertation on the Helleborism of the Ancients" ("A dissertation medical history on the Hellebore of the ancients"). Her thesis examined in depth the historical literature and tried to differentiate between the ancient use of Helleborus niger, or black hellebore, and the medicinal uses of the "white hellebore", botanically Veratrum album, which are poisonous plants.

Hahnemann continued to practice and research homeopathy, as well as write and lecture for the rest of his life. He died in 1843 in Paris, at the age of 88, and is entombed in a mausoleum in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

Descendants

There are some living descendants of Hahnemann's older sister, Charlotte (1752-1812), but Hahnemann's own living descendants come from one of his daughters.

Hahnemann's daughter, Amelie (1789–1881), had a son: Leopold Suss-Hahnemann. Leopold emigrated to England and practiced homeopathy in London. He retired to the Isle of Wight and died there at the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Dr. Leopold Suss-Hahnemann's youngest daughter, Amalia, had two children, Winifred (born 1898) and Herbert. William Herbert Tankard-Hahnemann (1922-2009) was Winifred's son. He served as a Major in the British Army during World War II and later had a career in the City of London. At one point he was appointed Freeman of the City of London. Sir William Herbert Tankard-Hahnemann, the great-great-grandson of Samuel Hahnemann, died on 12 January 2009 (his 87th birthday) after 22 years of active patronage of the British Institute of Homeopathy. The William Tankard-Hahnemann line continues with his son, Charles

Samuel Hahnemann Monument in Scott Circle, Washington, D.C.

Works

Hahnemann wrote several books, essays, and letters on the homeopathic method, chemistry, and general medicine:

• Translation of the William Cullen Treaty, A Treatise on Medica Matter.
• Heilkunde der Erfahrung. Norderstedt 2010, ISBN 3-8423-1326-8
• Versuch über ein neues Prinzip zur Auffindung der Heilkräfte der Arzneisubstanzen, nebst einigen Blicken auf die bisherigen [Ensay on a new principle to determine the healing powers of drugs] (in German). 1796.reprinted in Versuch über ein neues Prinzip zur Auffindung der Heilkräfte der Arzneisubstanzen, nebst einigen Blicken auf die bisherigen. Haug. 1988. ISBN 3-7760-1060-6.
• Fragmenta de viribus medicinarum positivis sive in sana corpore human obeservitis, a collection of 27 "tests" of drugs published in Latin in 1805.
• The Organon of the Healing Art (1810), a detailed description of what he saw as the fundamental basis of homeopathic medicine and guidelines for practice. Hahnemann published the fifth edition in 1833; a revised draft of this (1842) was discovered after Hahnemann's death and finally published as the sixth edition in 1921.
• Medical Pura a compilation of reports of "homeopathic tests", published in six volumes between the vol. I in 1811 and vol. VI in 1827. The revised editions of volumes I and II were published in 1830 and 1833 respectively.
• Chronic diseases (1828), an explanation of the root and cure of chronic diseases according to the theory of miasmas, together with a compilation of reports of "homeopathic tests", published in five volumes during the 1830s.
• The Friend of Health In which Hahnemann "recommended the use of fresh air, bed rest, proper diet, sunlight, public hygiene and many other beneficial measures at a time when many other doctors considered them worthless."
• Call for a thinking philanthropist regarding the mode of propagation of cholera Asian, In which Hahnemann describes the doctors and nurses of the cholera as the "true and frequent promoters" of the cholera and that, while mocking the "flighting with chlorine" of the nurses, they promoted the use of "threatening spirit feats" as a cure for the disease.
• Hahnemann also campaigned for the human treatment of madmen in 1792.
• John Henry Clarke wrote that "In 1787, Hahnemann discovered the best test of arsenic and other poisons in wine, after pointing out the unreliable nature of the ' Wurtemberg test', which had been in use until that date."
• Samuel Hahnemanns Apothekerlexikon. Vol. 2. Crusius, Leipzig 1798–1799 Digital Edition of the University and State Library of Düsseldorf.
• Reine Arzneimittellehre. Arnold, Dresden (various editions) 1822–1827 Digital Edition of the University and State Library of Düsseldorf
• Systematische Darstellung der reinen Arzneiwirkungen aller bisher geprüften Mittel. Vieweg, Braunschweig 1831 - Digital Edition of the University and State Library of Düsseldorf