PHYSICIANS OF GENIUS: HAHNEMANN

Hahnemann: The Father Of Homoeopathy.

(By all means read my entry Physicians Of Genius: Hippocrates, posted yesterday as the first installment in the Physicians series, to be followed tomorrow by the closing entry of this short series Physicians Of Genius: Kent.)

The reader may wonder why I am now writing about physicians and medical matters, when my educational background, even though extensive, does not extend to medicine, and thus I may  not be competent enough to write about medicine. To which I reply that each of us, especially those of an advanced age, have had an adequate lifetime medical experience to know which medicine and how has helped us and which has failed. In my life experience, homeopathy has played a large and positive role, thanks to the research and practical endeavors of my wife Galina Sedova, and the least I can do in this regard is to give credit to them both, that is, to homoeopathy and to my wife, in this fashion.

Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843) started his professional life as a polyglot, proficient in many languages, and a writer, primarily interested in the philosophy of medicine. The latter preoccupation compelled him to study medicine, which he did diligently and thoughtfully, having received his doctorate in medicine and a license to practice. He was, however, acutely dissatisfied with the state of conventional medicine, and particularly with its philosophical inadequacy. “Physicians are my brethren; I have nothing against them personally,” he declares in the Preface to the Second Edition of his Organon of Medicine, in 1818. “[But] I have to inquire whether medicine, as hitherto taught, has, in all its parts, been merely developed out of the heads, the self-deception, and the caprice of its professors, or whether it has been derived from nature. If it be merely a product of speculative subtlety, arbitrary maxims, traditional practices and capricious deductions drawn from ambiguous premises, it is and remains a nullity, though it may reckon its age by thousands of years, and be decorated with the charters of all the kings and emperors of the earth.”

As we can see, the genius of Hahnemann already reveals itself in his treatment of medicine as a philosophy, first and foremost, rather than merely an unthinking tradition and perfunctory practice. His target of attack is therefore not just the routine practitioner of medicine, but the cream of the allopathic crop, the professors who possess a philosophy of their own, and that philosophy, in Hahnemann’s enlightened view, is demonstrably deficient, in treating the superficial symptoms, rather than the patient’s underlying condition.

He was also expressly concerned with the high mortality rate among sick patients attributing it not so much to the severity of the patients ailments as to the inadequacy of those who treat them.

It goes without saying that Dr. Hahnemann withdrew from his standard medical practice, and concentrated on the study of an alternative medical philosophy. Having discovered that certain substances produce negative symptoms in healthy patients, he deduced from this that the same substances may have healing power over sick patients with those same symptoms. First a philosophical hypothesis, this daring approach eventually resulted in the creation and development of Hahnemann’s new “homoeopathic” medicine, incorporating the revolutionary principle of “like cures like” and the no less revolutionary discovery that less medicine is better, in the sense that smaller amounts of a remedy tend to produce lesser aggravation and a better overall effect.

…I am a believer in homoeopathy and I admire Dr. Hahnemann for his new science. But this well-deserved specific admiration is only one of the reasons why I consider him one of the brightest geniuses of science in human history. Every great scientist must be a great philosopher and Dr. Hahnemann was a philosopher par excellence. I may not know much about medicine, but I can understand and appreciate medical philosophy, and I also know what works and what does not work in practical results.