Christian Friedrich Samuel
Hahnemann ( 10 April 1755 – 2 July
1843) was a German physician, best known for creating the pseudoscientific
system of alternative medicine called homeopathy. His father Christian
Gottfried Hahnemann was a painter and designer of porcelain, for which the
town of Meissen is famous.
As
a young man, Hahnemann became proficient in a number of languages, including English,
French, Italian, Greek and Latin. He eventually made a living as a translator
and teacher of languages, gaining further proficiency in Arabic, Syriac, Chaldaic
and Hebrew.
Hahnemann studied medicine for two years at Leipzig. Citing Leipzig's lack of clinical facilities, he moved to Vienna, where he studied for ten months. In 1781, Hahnemann took a village doctor's position in the copper-mining area of Mansfeld, Saxony. He soon married Johanna Henriette Kuchler and would eventually have eleven children.After abandoning medical practice, and while working as a translator of scientific and medical textbooks, Hahnemann travelled around Saxony for many years, staying in many different towns and villages for varying lengths of time, never living far from the River Elbe and settling at different times in Dresden, Torgau, Leipzig and Köthen (Anhalt) before finally moving to Paris in June 1835.
Hahnemann studied medicine for two years at Leipzig. Citing Leipzig's lack of clinical facilities, he moved to Vienna, where he studied for ten months. In 1781, Hahnemann took a village doctor's position in the copper-mining area of Mansfeld, Saxony. He soon married Johanna Henriette Kuchler and would eventually have eleven children.After abandoning medical practice, and while working as a translator of scientific and medical textbooks, Hahnemann travelled around Saxony for many years, staying in many different towns and villages for varying lengths of time, never living far from the River Elbe and settling at different times in Dresden, Torgau, Leipzig and Köthen (Anhalt) before finally moving to Paris in June 1835.
Hahnemann was dissatisfied
with the state of medicine in his time, and particularly objected to practices
such as bloodletting. He claimed that the medicine he had been taught to practice
sometimes did the patient more harm than good: After giving up his
practice around 1784, Hahnemann made his living chiefly as a writer and
translator, while resolving also to investigate the causes of medicine's
alleged errors. While translating William Cullen's A
Treatise on the Materia Medica, Hahnemann encountered the claim that cinchona, the bark of a Peruvian tree, was effective in treating malaria because of its astringency. Hahnemann believed that
other astringent substances are not effective against malaria and began to
research cinchona's effect on the human body by self-application. Noting that
the drug induced malaria-like symptoms in himself, he concluded that it
would do so in any healthy individual. This led him to postulate a healing
principle: "that which can produce a set of symptoms in a healthy
individual, can treat a sick individual who is manifesting a similar set of
symptoms. This principle, like cures like, became the basis
for an approach to medicine which he gave the name homeopathy. He first used the
term homeopathy in his essay Indications of the Homeopathic
Employment of Medicines in Ordinary Practice, published in Hufeland's Journal in 1807.
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