Samuel Hahnemann - Life - Part 1

Born Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann in Meissen, Saxony, a town "famous for its porcelain. His father, uncles and grandfathers were all painters and designers of porcelain."^[1] Hahnemann showed "a marked proficiency in languages, of which he spoke at least nine;"^[2] "by twenty he had mastered English, French, Italian, Greek and Latin,"^[3] and was making a living as a translator and teacher of languages. He later gained proficiency in "Arabic, Syriac, Chaldaic and Hebrew."^[3]

Hahnemann studied medicine for two years at Leipzig and ten months at Vienna. While studying at Leipzig, it was the "lack of clinical facilities (that) soon led him to move to Vienna."^[4] He graduated MD at the University of Erlangen on 10 August 1779, after only one term’s further study, qualifying with honors with a thesis on the treatment of cramps, titled Conspectus adfectuum spasmodicorum aetiologicus et therapeuticus.^[5][6] It is said that poverty forced him to choose Erlangen only because he had learned that the fees there would be less.^[7] In 1781, he took a village doctor’s position in the copper-mining area of Mansfeld, Saxony.^[8] "Shortly thereafter he married Johanna Henriette Kuchler;"^[3] they had eleven children. While there are no known living descendants today of Hahnemann himself, there are a few of his older sister Charlotte's (1752-1812).^[9]

Hahnemann claimed that the medicine of his time did as much harm as good:

My sense of duty would not easily allow me to treat the unknown pathological state of my suffering brethren with these unknown medicines. The thought of becoming in this way a murderer or malefactor towards the life of my fellow human beings was most terrible to me, so terrible and disturbing that I wholly gave up my practice in the first years of my married life and occupied myself solely with chemistry and writing.^[3]

After giving up his practice (c.1784) he 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 claimed that other astringent substances are not effective against malaria and began to research cinchona's effect on the human organism by self-application. He claimed that the drug evoked malaria-like symptoms in himself, and 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."^[3] This principle, like cures like, became the basis for an approach to medicine which he gave the name homeopathy.