Organon of the Medical Art

Dr. SAMUEL HAHNEMANN
Samuel Hahnemann was a physician, chemist, linguist, philosopher, historian of medicine, and scientific revolutionary. Early in his career, he became so disillusioned with the state of medical practice that he stopped practicing medicine in the firm belief that the methods he was taught would do more harm than good.

Instead he made his living translating medical and other texts. While Hahnemann was translating the Scottish physican William Cullen's Materia Medica, specifically the section on the toxicology of Peruvian bark, he was struck by the similarity between the symptoms of poisoning from Peruvian bark (also known as cinchona, from which quinine is derived) and the symptoms of malaria against which it was used as a medicine. It occurred to him that this similarity might not be coincidental, but rather it might be the very basis of the medicine's curative power.

Through numerous experiments conducted over several years, Hahnemann established that any medicine will cure a particular disease if it is capable of producing symptoms in healthy individuals which are similar to the totality of disease symptoms in the sick. These experiments also led to Hahnemann's development of guidelines for medicinal experimentation, which include testing medicines only upon healthy individuals (to avoid confounding the action of the medicine with the symptoms of the disease), the use of small doses, and the testing of any medicine on both men and women and on people with various bodily constitutions in order to determine a medicine's full range of action.

Hahnemann's use of minute, potentized medicinal doses originally arose from his interest in reducing the adverse affects of medicines. He then discovered that by successively diluting and succussing a medicinal substance, not only were the adverse effects of the medicine diminished, but the inherent curative power of the substance was dramatically increased. This led to his discovery that medicines and diseases act dynamically, not materially.

Hahnemann was a linguist of phenomenal ability. He spoke German, Latin, Greek and French fluently. At the age of twelve, he was given the responsibility of teaching other children Greek and Latin. As an adult, he translated complex medical texts from English, French, Greek and Latin, and quoted from Hebrew and Aramaic texts in his teaching. In all, he was conversant in at least eleven languages. His multi-lingual ability was integrated with his equally complex and multi-faceted way of viewing the world.

While Hahnemann's view of health and disease was accessible to the most intuitive minds of his generation, they had little scientific basis for understanding why things worked as Hahnemann indicated. Hahnemann himself attached little importance to understanding the 'why' of his discoveries, focusing instead on the 'what' and the 'how.' He constructed his philosophy and practice of medicine upon unbiased observation, pure experience, and unfettered deliberation. It is only recently that we are beginning to formulate theoretical constructs that address the 'why.'

Hahnemann's approach to medicine had little to do with the understanding of the world described by the Newtonian physics of his day; it is much more closely aligned with the currently unfolding world of post-quantum physics. Hahnemann envisioned a holistic world in which the foot is not the man himself. He saw that individuals were neither jigsaw puzzles nor pieces in a larger puzzle, where the sum of all parts equals a whole. Rather, he saw that parts of a larger whole holographically represent that whole; the whole and its parts form an indivisible unity.

Over the course of a sixty-year career, from 1783 when he stopped practicing the medicine of his day, until he died in 1843, Samuel Hahnemann developed the homeopathic mode of medical treatment, which was as different from the prevailing medical practice as day is to night. Its basic premises were the use of similar medicines whose actions were fully known to the medical-art practitioner, the individualized treatment of a person's disease, the use of one single, simple medicine at a time to avoid the unpredictable effects of combining two or more drugs, and the use of potentized medicines whose ability to act dynamically upon the patient's life force was thereby greatly increased. Another major achievement was Hahnemann's identification of miasms and his differentiation between the essential nature of a disease (its 'wesen') and the forms in which it manifests.

During his long professional career, Hahnemann condensed his precepts on the philosophy and practice of medicine and the maintenance of health into successive editions of the Organon of the Medical Art. The first edition was published in 1810, and the sixth and final edition was completed in 1842, the year before he died (see Comments on the Text, p. 275). Hahnemann did not write the Organon only for medical pracitioners, in fact, he prescribed the Organon to patients. The book itself is a remedy of the highest potency. Like other great works of art, it constantly reveals new marvels and mysteries, acting dynamically in relation to each reader, and acting differently with each reading.

« Go back