6 - Similia Similibus Curentur: Homeopathy and Its Magic Wand of Analogy

Summary

By all accounts, Samuel Hahnemann (1755–1843) merits a prominent place in the history of medicine as the only practicing physician ever to have founded an entire system of medical treatment, that of homeopathy. His insights and innovations were manifold. Even had he not invented the homeopathic cure, he was for his era a radical, farsighted thinker: he pioneered public hygiene, promoted a pure diet and healthy lifestyle, trenchantly criticized the harsh medical treatments common to his day, and read illness as a disruption of the mind-body connection and life's vital force. But although Hahnemann established a new medical paradigm, his innovation cannot be contemplated outside related systems of thought current at the time. Proponents of homeopathy, however, tend to present Hahnemann as unique and revolutionary, and they are not alone. Historians of medicine invariably allot him a chapter unto himself, constructing the two-centuries-long narrative of homeopathy with Hahnemann at its start. Unfortunately, the unintended result of this narrative drive to establish clear beginnings is that similarities between Hahnemann and German Romanticism are generally overlooked, in particular Romantic modes of reading. No doubt the chroniclers of homeopathy have been misled by the founder himself: although a learned, skilled translator fluent in seven languages, Hahnemann tended to promote himself as an innovator and denied being influenced by any medical predecessors. He publicly criticized, for instance, the Naturphilosophie of Schelling and his followers, writing that “their dualism, their polarization, and representation … their potentizing and depotentizing … incorporeal and ethereal,… soars aloft beyond our solar system, beyond the bounds of the actual.”