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Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann was born into a respectable middle class family from Saxony, Germany. His parents were Christian Gottfried Hahnemann and Johanna Christina, nee Spiess, and he was their third child.
Samuel's father sympathised with the Deist movement and had a great respect for Rousseau, the French philosopher; as a result, he encouraged SH to be serious, self-disciplined, hard working and an independent thinker.
In 1775, Samuel went to the University of Leipzig to study medicine where he was helped by Dr Bergrath Porner, but Hahnemann's inquiring and scientific mind was not satisfied with the dry theories and book learning of the medical professors.
Hahnemann stayed in Leizpig until 1777 and then decided to go to the Brothers of Mercy hospital in Vienna, where he was helped by Dr Von Quarin, physician to the Empress Maria Theresa and where he stayed for nine months before leaving for Hermanstadt, due to Quarin introducing Hahnemann to Baron von Brukenthal, the then Governor of Transylvania, who offered Hahnemann the position of family physician and custodian of his important library.
it was in Hermanstadt that Hahnemann was introduced to the Freemasons' Lodge, and accepted as a Brother.
He stayed in Hermanstadt for one year and nine months, where he practised as a doctor and looked after the Baron's library. He then entered the University of Erlangen and on 10th August 1779 he graduated and was awarded his Doctor's Degree. But in 1785, Hahnemann became disillusioned with the medical profession, because he found that most of his patients would have been better off not consulting a doctor than consulting one. He gave up the practice and decided to make his living by translating medical and chemistry texts and in 1789, he had published in the second volume of Kreb's Medical Observations his first piece: "Directions for Curing Old Sores and Indolent Ulcers and in its introduction, he made his first public criticism of the medical profession. But despite having his faith in the medical profession badly shaken, his intellectual curiosity led him to investigate every aspect of medicine and chemistry in his search to better serve humanity.
Hahnemann was inspired by the works of Albrecht Von Haller, who wrote in his Pharmacopoeia Hevelt in 1771 of the need to test small doses of medicines on healthy individuals in order to ascertain their medicinal effects. Of this suggestion Hahnemann observed "no one, not a single physician attended to or followed up this invaluable hint."
Also, in 1789 Hahnemann published his translation of Cullen's Materia Medica and criticised bloodletting and other purging methods in use in his day. He was also critical of the reasons Cullen gave for the medicinal properties of many of the remedies in his materia medica, and he questioned his belief that the Peruvian bark (China) got its medicinal action from its bitter taste and tonic effects on the stomach.
As the Peruvian bark was being used at the time to cure intermittent fever, Hahnemann decided to try Von Haller's methods to test it out. Hahnemann began to take four drams of Peruvian bark twice daily for several days - this was the first of 99 remedies that SH used to test on himself and close associates, and which was later recorded in his The Materia Medica Pura and The Chronic Diseases their Peculiar Nature and their Homoeopathic treatment - and he discovered that the various symptoms he was experiencing were typical of intermittent fever. He didn't actually have the fever, just its symptoms and when he discontinued taking the Peruvian bark, the symptoms disappeared. In his first homoeopathic proving, he found a reason for the action of remedies that satisfied both his observations and experience: "Peruvian bark, which is used as a remedy for intermittent fever, acts because it can produce symptoms similar to those of intermittent fever in healthy people." With this realisation came the dawn of homoeopathy and the maxim: 'Similia Similibus Curentur': similars be cured by similars.
It was Hahnemann's great respect for the 'secrets of nature' that guided him in all his discoveries. He believed that there was wisdom within the human soul for those who were willing to look deeper than just the surface.
One of the earliest proponents of the vitalist school who deserves special mention is the great Renaissance physician Paracelsus (1493-1541), who undoubtedly came closest to the therapeutical ideals of Hahnemann. After him the Vienna physician Anton Freiherr von Störck (1731-1803) and the Englishman John Brown (1780) had formulated similar ideas.
And it all began with Hippocrates, who after closely observing nature, announced that there are two possible ways of curing: by the contraries and the similars. Aulus Cornelius Celsus (fl. 1st century AD, Rome), one of the greatest Roman medical writers, by some writers is ascribed to have received renown for relying on this approach. The way of contraries would be followed a century later by Galen of Pergamum (born AD 129, died c. 199). The system of similars would be sketched by philosophers such as Saint Thomas Aquinas and by doctors who defined the so-called vitalism in medicine.
While Hahnemann was living in Tourgau in 1810 he published the first complete text book on homoeopathic philosophy: The Organon of the Rational System of Healing.
The Organon gave the healing profession the first complete picture of homoeopathic philosophy and pathology (and still does (5th/6th Editions)) and laid the foundation for a new revolutionary system of healing. It still is the central manuscript on which the Art and Science of Homoeopathy is based.