Hahnemann: The Father of Homeopathy - Part 5

The turn of the century was a trying time for Samuel Hahnemann, especially in relation to his ability to practice his new method. If you remember from part 4, Hahnemann started using homeopathy with patients around 1796, in Konigslutter. But a few years later, his success during a scarlet fever epidemic caused his “professional brethren” to turn on him. Hahnemann’s patients rarely died, whereas the other physicians had significantly higher mortality rates. Nonsensically, rather than embrace the new and better method, they decided that Hahnemann had to go, and they joined forces to make that happen. Physicians elsewhere, in other cities, used the same ammunition to stop Hahnemann from practicing, meaning that as long as he refused to use the apothecaries for his medicines, he was not allowed to practice, and since he had a low opinion of apothecaries, thanks to his vast experience of them, he would never agree to use them.

It looked like his professional brethren had checkmated him. He was “poor and persecuted, driven from town to town,” and actually spent time back in Dessau, residing with his wife’s stepfather. He “lived by himself, and in his study, laying aside all medical practice” in order to “devote more time to the elaboration of the homeopathic method of healing.” I haven’t found additional details about these months in Dessau, but I’ve wondered if his wife and children lived with her mother while Hahnemann lived above his (step) father-in-law’s apothecary shop “by himself.” Did Samuel and Johanna go through a period of separation?

During this time, Hahnemann’s translation work also tapered off. His bitterness had caused his footnotes and forwards to become too sarcastic and derogatory, so the booksellers stopped hiring him. In one of his last translations, “Thesaurus Medicaminum, a New Collection of Medical Prescriptions,” he denounced the whole book, and commented sarcastically (when five substances were recommended for one prescription), “Why not include, also, the entire Materia Medica?”

But he published many articles and continued to dabble in his hobby, chemistry. He also wrote editorials to the non-medical public, defending his good name against the many slanderous attacks coming from his enemies, the non-homeopathic physicians. His optimism about revolutionizing medicine sharply declined during this period, as reflected in a quote from 1801: “The perfecting of our science in this new century is becoming an increasingly sad and gloomy business; without professional liberality and friendliness it will continue to be a science for bunglers for another full century.”

His chemistry hobby got him into a bit of trouble around 1800, and the error he made was thrown in his face for the rest of his life by all who wanted to discredit him. He made the mistake of saying he had found a new chemical salt that later turned out to be Borax, a quite well-known substance. Hahnemann admitted his mistake, refunded monies gained by the substance, and explained in several journals, “I am incapable of willfully deceiving. I may, like other men, be unintentionally mistaken. I am in the same boat with Klaproth and his ‘Diamond Spar,’ and with Proust and his ‘Pearl salt.” [NOTE: The chemists of the day were always seeking new substances, and often made mistakes. One chemist, Van Ruprecht, made three new discoveries that all turned out to be iron, the errors most likely caused by his rusty crucibles.]

And all through these difficult years Hahnemann continued to fight for the ability to make his single-remedy medicines, comparing enforced restrictions to a great artist who is told he cannot prepare his own “expressive, beautiful, and durable colors.” Instead of Raphael, Michael Angelo, and Titian creating masterpieces, their paintings “would have been ordinary daubs and mere market goods” had they been ordered to purchase their colors from a shop. In 1805, he published, “Aesculapius in the Balance,” in which he gives detailed arguments against the laws pertaining to apothecaries, revealing that an apothecary often “sends a different prescription from the chemically impossible one ordered by the physician, or substitutes one drug for another.” He says that, rather than prohibiting a physician from making his own medicine, “the physician should be prohibited, under the severest penalties, from allowing any other person to prepare the medicines required for his patients,” particularly since he’s the only one responsible for the outcome. In 1805, Hahnemann also published the first book on his provings, described in part 4.

The publicity from the scarlet fever epidemic caused Hahnemann to receive many letters containing requests for medical help, which he answered if they contained a fee. Slowly, his finances began to improve, and around 1805 he moved his family to Torgau, where he stayed for 6 or 7 years—a long time for him. He even bought a house with a garden, and he also began treating patients again. Perhaps the physicians backed off from their persecutions since “Aesculapius in the Balance” had outed the apothecaries so thoroughly that it would be difficult to defend them.

Hahnemann was in Torgau when he published his textbook on homeopathy, "Organon of Medicine," in 1810. A grateful patient/publisher in Dresden agreed to print the book, but it certainly didn’t fly off the shelves. Nevertheless, its publication unleashed a tidal wave of hatred from physicians and “was the signal for the commencement of a violent warfare against Hahnemann.” The "Organon of Medicine" besmirched their morals as well as their methods, so the gauntlet was officially thrown down. Dr. Constantine Hering, one of the first homeopaths to set up practice in America, wrote of the event, “It is disgusting to state how it was received; it was, and it remains forever, an inexcusable meanness of the whole profession.” One Dr. A. F. Hecker, of Berlin, panned the book so viciously that even Hahnemann’s opponents defended him against that review.

[An aside: Hering, born in 1800 in Germany, moved to Philadelphia in 1833 and is considered the Father of Homeopathy in the Americas. A medical doctor, he initially set out to expose homeopathy as a sham and was ultimately convinced of its validity when the homeopathic remedy Arsenicum album cured him of a gangrenous dissecting wound. Many physicians came to support homeopathy in this way—by trying it for themselves.]

Hahnemann rarely responded directly to the physicians. He didn’t want to give strength to their accusations by acknowledging them. However, the critique of his textbook pushed him to the limit. In a letter to his publisher, he wrote, “If Hecker and opponents of his stamp remain unrefuted, I cannot with honor go on with the educational works I am projecting, and even the Organon itself will cease to be respected. No one would believe the effect such mendacious representations have on the public.” He asked his son, Friedrich, to write a pamphlet refuting the many critiques. Friedrich, who was 24 years old and studying to become a doctor himself, was listed as author, but it was clear to those who were familiar with Hahnemann’s writings that he had guided his son’s hand.

The positive side of all the bad publicity was that it gained Hahnemann many converts to his new system of healing. Those with open minds, who were willing to give homeopathy a try, often continued with it—some partially, others wholeheartedly. But Hahnemann saw the wisdom of sharing his method with medical students, who had not yet had the old methods firmly fixed in their minds. In 1811, he decided to “engage more actively in the propagation of his new system by means of didactic lectures.” He moved his family back to “the great medical city of Leipzig,” and gave a brilliant thesis entitled, “A Medical Historical Dissertation on the Helleborism of the Ancients.” His dissertation is a “wonder of philological research,” and its brilliance earned him the right to lecture in the Medical Department at the University of Leipzig.