The German Genius

him to the mental hospital (again, as we would say). There, the cabinetmaker was strapped to a chair attached to a mechanism that enabled it to be rotated rapidly sixty times a minute. This “treatment” used the centrifugal force of the rotating chair to send blood rushing to the patient’s brain, producing dizziness, vomiting, evacuation from the bowels and kidneys, “while blood even oozed from the skin around the eyes.” Such brutality reduced even the wildest inmates to catatonics. These experiences eventually led to Hahnemann’s book Freund der Gesundheit ( The Friend of Health; 1792), written after he had settled in Leipzig, where he put forward the idea of a public hygiene policy, becoming one of the first people to do so. And it was in Leipzig that he translated Treatise on the Materia Medica , by William Cullen, a professor of medicine in Edinburgh. 22 In the course of translating this work, Hahnemann had the idea for which the world now knows him.
    Cullen had written the following sentence when he was discussing the properties of cinchona bark (the source of quinine), which he said was a “febrifuge,” a substance that drives away fever: “In this case the bark works by means of its fortifying effect on the stomach.” Hahnemann was brought up short. He knew that cinchona had never fortified his stomach. On the contrary, quinine made him very sick. Accordingly, he now decided on his own trial. “By way of experiment, I took four drams of good cinchona twice a day. My feet, my fingertips, at first became cold.” There was no sign at all of his stomach being “fortified.” “I grew languid and drowsy; then my heart began to palpitate, and my pulse became hard and small; intolerable anxiety, trembling (but without cold rigour), prostration through all my limbs. Then pulsation in my head, flushing of my cheeks, and, in short, all those symptoms which are ordinarily characteristic of intermittent fever, one after another made their appearance.” It was a little while later that he noted the observation that would change everything: “Substances which excite a kind of fever extinguish the types of intermittent fever.”
    Fever cures fever . That was Hahnemann’s new doctrine. As Gumpert says, “We must remember that this was before the germ or cell theories of disease, and that Hahnemann’s new ideas were an alternative to the brutal current method of the evacuation of ‘pernicious juices.’” 23 In 1796 Hahnemann offered a paper to the newly founded Journal of Practical Medicine titled, “Essay on a New Principle for Ascertaining the Curative Power of Drugs, with a Few Glances at Those Hitherto Employed.” His central idea was now clearly set out: “ In order to cure diseases, we must search for medicines that can excite a similar disease in the human body .” “ Similia similibus! ”—this is the essence of homeopathy. 24
    He formulated his views in full in Die Organon der rationellen Heilkunde (translated as The Organon of Homeopathic Medicine ; 1810) and Theory of Chronic Diseases (1828–39), where he argued for the use of minute quantities of remedies that, in larger doses, produce effects similar to those of the disease being treated. 25 His wilder views are revealed in his further belief that small doses of medication could be induced to have powerful effects by vigorous shaking (called succussion ). He referred to this increase in potency as dynamization , which, for Hahnemann, released an “energy” that he regarded as “immaterial and spiritual.” Eventually, he thought patients need not swallow “dynamized” medicines at all; it was enough to sniff them.
    Most doctors dismiss homeopathy now on the grounds that any active ingredients, such as they are, are diluted often by 10,000 times, reducing them to well below the levels at which any pharmaceutical capacity could exert an effect.
    Hahnemann continued practicing homeopathy over a long life, dying in Paris (he had married a French patient in 1843, when he was eighty-eight). He was visited by patients from all over the world, and a Homeopathic Medical College opened in Philadelphia in 1848. By 1900 America had 111 homeopathic hospitals, those 22 homeopathic medical schools mentioned earlier, and 1,000 homeopathic pharmacies. Thereafter the fashion for homeopathic cures declined, only to resurface in the 1960s. It is now very popular in India, Latin America, and Europe, and Great Britain has five homeopathic