Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T14:54:22.969Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

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

from Part II - Reading, Secularization, and Transcendence in the Long Nineteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2013

Alice Kuzniar
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina
Eric Downing
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Jonathan M. Hess
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Richard V. Benson
Affiliation:
Valparaiso University
Get access

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.”

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×