Homeopathy is a system of medicine whose principles are even older than Hypocrites it seeks to cure in accordance with natural laws of healing and uses medicines made from natural substances: animal, vegetable, and mineral.

Homeopathy was "discovered" in the early 1800's by a German ,physician, Samuel Christian Frederick Hahnemann. Shortly after setting up practice, he became disillusioned with medicine, and with good reason. Eighteenth and nineteenth century physicians believed that sickness was caused by humors, or fluids, that had to be expelled from the body by every possible means. To achieve this end, patients were cauterized, blistered, purged, and bled. Hahnemann protested against these brutal and senseless methods, and his colleagues quickly denounced him. for heresy. He-was also opposed to the way doctors prescribed medicines. In those days it was customary to mix a great number of drugs in one prescription. In his book, "Who Is Your Doctor and Why?" Dr. Alonzo J. Shadman mentions having seen, in the Pharmacopoeia of 1875,:a prescription that contained fifty ingredients. Earlier, Hahnemanner's outspoken criticism of this "degrading commerce in prescription" naturally enraged the chemists, who were as powerful as our drug companies today, and they were to hound him all of his life.

Hahnemann gave up the practice of medicine and turned to medical translating as a livelihood. But he persisted in his lifelong goal-to discover "if God had not indeed given some law, whereby the diseases of mankind would be cured." His sense of frustration increased when one of his children became critically ill and he could do nothing for her.

It was while translating Lectures on the Materia Medica by William Cullen, a Scottish professor of medicine, that Hahnemann stumble on the key to curing sick people. In this work, the author claimed that cinchona bark, or quinine, cured intermittent fever (malaria) because of its astringent and bitter qualities. This explanation did not sound plausible to Hahnemann, who knew of other substances equally bitter, so he did a daring thing; he tested the medicine on himself -

"I took by way of experiment, twice a day, four drachmas of good China (quinine). My feet, finger ends, etc. at first became cold; I grew languid and drowsy then my heart began to palpitate, and my pulse grew hard and small: intolerable anxiety. trembling. prostration throughout all my limbs; then pulsation, in the head, redness of my cheeks, thirst and, in short, all these symptoms which are ordinarily characteristic of intermittent fever, made their appearance, one after the other. yet without the peculiar chilly, shivering rigor. Briefly, even those symptoms which are of regular occurrence and especially characteristic as the stupidity of mind, the kind of rigidity in all the limbs, but above all the numb, disagreeable sensation, which seems to have its eat in the periosteum, over every bone in the body all these make their appearance. This paroxysm lasted two or three hours each time, and recurred if I repeated this dose, not otherwise; I discontinued it, and was in good health."

This was this first "proving," a testing of medicine on a healthy person. The symptoms Hahnemann developed corresponded exactly to the symptoms of malaria. Thus Hahnemann reasoned that malaria was cured by quinine, not because of its bitter taste but owing to the fact that the drug produces the of malaria in a healthy person.

After experimenting on himself, Hahnemann enlisted the help of friends and followers and embarked on an extensive program of drug testing. When he died at age eighty-eight in 1843, he had conducted or supervised proving on ninety-nine substances. More than 600 other medicines were added to the homeopathic Pharmacopoeia by the end of the century.

The term homeopathy comes from the Greek homes ("similar") and pathos ("suffering" or "sickness"). The fundamental law upon which homeopathy is based is the law of similars, or "Like is cured by like"-in Latin, similia similibus :curentur. The law of similars states that a remedy can cure a disease if it produces in a healthy person, symptoms to those of the disease.

Hahnemann did not claim to have discovered the concept. In the tenth century B.C., Hindu sages described the law as had Hypocrites, who wrote in 400 B.C.: Through the like, disease is produced and through the application of the like, it is cured." Paracelsus, a sixteenth-century German physician reiterated the law. Hahnemann, as an erudite thinker, was undoubtedly familiar with these writings, but he was the first to test the principles and establish it as the cornerstone of-system of medicine.

A person develops a fever, with flushed face, dilated pupils, rapid heartbeat, and a feeling of restlessness. The homeopathic physician studies all these symptoms, then searches for a remedy that, under scientifically controlled conditions, has produced all these symptoms in a healthy person. Within a short time after taking remedy, the fever drops to normal and the person feels well. The law of similars enables the physician to select the one medicine (the simillimum) that is needed by matching the symptoms to the remedy induce.

And much more is available in the program for reference.

For more information on Homeopathy - Homeopathic Links