The History

Homeopathy's roots emerge from the findings, teachings and writings of Dr. Samuel Hahnemann  (1755-1843). Hahnemann graduated from medical school in 1779 and started his own medical practice. He soon began his first homeopathic experiments in 1790, as a result of his disillusionment with such common medical practices of the day as purging, bloodletting, and the use of toxic chemicals.

At one point, he gave up his own daily practice to begin working as a chemist while translating medical texts. It was when Hahnemann began working on a project to translate William Cullen's Materia Medica into German that he began his quest for a better way of providing healthcare using the principles of "Similars." While working on this project, he became fascinated with a species of South American tree-bark (cinchona) which was being used to treat malaria-induced fever. Hahnemann ingested the bark and discovered that it caused symptoms similar to malaria. He continued his research into "cures" and the idea of "similar suffering," and began compiling his findings. Similia similibus curentur, the Latin phrase meaning "let likes be cured by likes," is the primary principle of homeopathy. A homeopath searches for a substance that produces in a healthy

The most important reason that homeopathy developed such immense popularity was its success in treating various infectious epidemics diseases that raged throughout America and Europe during the 1800s.

Medical historians state that Death Rates in homeopathic hospitals was half to as less than one eight compared to those patients in allopathic hospitals. Homeopaths were successful in treating patients suffering from the cholera epidemic in 1849. Their success rate was 95%.

Homeopathy works equally well for both viruses and for bacterial infections. Homeopathic medicine was first used for a wide-scale epidemic in 1801 when Samuel Hahnemann MD, observed that a child who was being treated with a homeopathic preparation of belladonna resisted scarlet fever even though all three siblings were affected. Wondering whether the belladonna had acted prophylactically, Hahnemann began giving it to children in other families when the first ones fell ill, and he found it to be protective despite a 90% attack rate among the untreated.

German physician Samuel Hahnemann founded the practice in the late eighteenth century, and soon after, it travelled to India in the medicine kits of European doctors and missionaries. The country got its first dose of homeopathy around the 1830s through John Honigberger, a Hungarian doctor who had studied under Hahnemann. Honigberger treated Lahore's Maharaja Ranjit Singh, whose vocal chords were paralysed, and, according to some accounts, the ruler's favourite horse, which was afflicted by an ulcer. Impressed, the maharaja allowed Honigberger to open a sort of out-patient department in Lahore