Homeopathy without Hahnemann

In recent issues of Homeopathy Today your editorials and book reviews have been more critical of the new trends in homeopathy even to the point of asking the question, “But is it homeopathy?”

It is an extremely pertinent and vital question.

The answer to this question is easily found in Hahnemann’s writings as he was the one who coined the term “homeopathy” for the medical system he developed.

Hahnemann clearly defined homeopathy and all its underlying principles throughout his many writings but especially in his masterwork, the Organon of Medicine.

In it he writes that homeopathy “employs for the cure only those medicines whose effects in altering and deranging (dynamically) the health it knows accurately, and from these it selects one whose health-altering power (its medicinal disease) is capable of removing the natural disease in question by similarity (similia similibus), and this it administers to the patient simply and alone, but in rare and minute doses. . . Thus homœopathy is a perfectly simple system of medicine, remaining always fixed in its principles as in its practice, which, like the doctrine whereon it is based, if rightly apprehended will be found to be complete (and therefore serviceable). What is clearly pure in doctrine and practice should be self-evident, and all backward sliding to the pernicious routinism of the old school that is as much its antithesis as night is to day, should cease to vaunt itself with the honorable name of Homœopathy.”

The word “accurately,” underlined by Hahnemann, is a key to the Hahnemannian method. Hahnemann demands of the homeopathic physician to be accurate and thorough in doing provings and in the examination of the patient.

Another aspect on which Hahnemann is firm is that the fundamental principles are to remain fixed and that all departures should not use the term “homeopathy.”

Any new trend which does not satisfy the fundamental principles and practice of homeopathy should simply not be called “homeopathy.”

Consequently each editor of any truly homeopathic publication has the ultimate duty to denounce these departures from homeopathy regardless of the reputation of their authors. Even more, everyone in a position of authority in homeopathy, whether as a teacher, board member or historian, has the same duty to denounce these departures so as to preserve our noble art and its institutions.

I therefore encourage the editor of Homeopathy Today to continue to denounce teachings which are at variance with the principles and practice of Hahnemann’s homeopathy.

History teaches that the practice of homeopathy becomes very vulnerable when the fundamental principles of homeopathy are tampered with, and that every departure has not only been met with failure but confused the multitudes it first attracted. The popularity of a departure does not validate it. Departures have come and gone. Homeopathy has survived all these departures because it is true. And pure homeopathy, like any other science, will continue to progress forward, not in spite of its timeless foundation but because of it. Even though this may be difficult to accept, pure homeopathy accepts no compromise. All who have mastered homeopathy have followed Hahnemann. Homeopathy without Hahnemann would be like playing Hamlet, without Hamlet.