One of the things that attracted me most to homeopathy was the beauty of its philosophy. The study of homeopathy is so multi-dimensional that it truly intrigues people who learn about it and love it on numerous levels. Homeopathy is not only the study of people in sickness and in health, as well as a study of medicines, but also a study of an exquisite philosophical system.

The greatest teacher of homeopathic philosophy was its founder, Dr. Samuel Hahnemann, a German physician, chemist, and linguist, whose first book, The Organon of Medicine explained the philosophy of homeopathy, and laid down the ground rules for how to use the system safely. He opens the book with the following words, "The physician's highest calling, his only calling, is to make sick people healthy--to heal, as it is termed.... The highest ideal of therapy is to restore health rapidly, gently, permanently; to remove and destroy the whole disease in the shortest, surest, least harmful way, according to clearly comprehensible principles."

Hahnemann, with the assistance of his colleagues, went on to prove over one hundred medicines in his lifetime. A proving is a controlled experiment, where healthy volunteers take an unknown substance from the animal, mineral or vegetable kingdoms and record the changes in their health that they observe. The volunteer is questioned carefully by a physician to ascertain the exact nature of the symptoms. In this way the medicinal uses of the substance are discovered. A medicine which can produce certain symptoms on healthy subjects will be able to cure those same symptoms when encountered in the sick. Matching the symptoms of the patient to a remedy which has produced similar symptoms in the provings is the basis of homeopathy. This is known as the law of similars or like cures like. The job of the homeopathic practitioner is to recognize what needs to be cured in the patient, to be familiar with homeopathic remedies and their healing properties, and to be able to apply the medicine to the sick person in the safest and gentlest way to initiate a healing process. This system and the method of employing it safely in healing the sick is the legacy of Dr. Samuel Hahnemann, to whom all who have benefited from homeopathy owe a debt of gratitude.

This is just a very brief introduction to homeopathic history and philosophy. To learn more about homeopathy, please contact Homeopathic Educational Services in Berkeley for a catalog of books on homeopathic philosophy and other subjects. Their number is (510) 649-0294.

Fall 2000