Heroic medicine originated in the work of John Brown (1735-1788), but had many influential advocates, including Benjamin Rush (1745-1813), a signatory of the American Declaration of Independence. A reaction against heroic medicine may, in part, explain the adoption by homeopaths of increasingly small doses.
Early in his career Hahnemann became so disillusioned with the practice of medicine that he abandoned it, instead earning his living as a translator. It was while translating, in 1790 ‘A treatise of Materia Medica’, by Brown’s mentor, William Cullen that he made his first, crucial observation. In a footnote he recorded his disagreement with Cullen’s elaborate theroretical explanation of the effects of Peruvian Bark, the bark of Cinchona officinalis, also known as China, the source of quinine. This was the first effective treatment for malaria, then endemic in parts of Europe. According to Cullen, its effects were due to its ‘tonic effects on the stomach’. Hahnemann expressed his disagreement in typically for the right terms, and went on to experiment on himself: ‘I took for several days, as an experiment, 4 drams (about 35grams) of good China twice a day’. He developed ‘all those symptoms which for me are typical of intermittent fever’ (3). This was the empirical ‘Newton’s Apple’ of homeopathy.
The roots of homeopathy are thus empirical, and some historians of medicine (notably Harris Coulter) have analysed the history of medicine in terms of dialectic between the holistic ‘Empirical’ and reductionist ‘Rationalist’ trends of thought. Both are to be found in the Hippocratic corpus. The empirical school developed through the thought of Celsus through Paracelsus, van Helmont, Sydenham, Laennec and Hahnemann, while the Rationalist school is represented by Galen, Boerhaave, Brown, Virchow and Bernard. According to Coulter, at least in the United States, the Rationalist school is now dominant, and this has lead to a crisis in medicine including its costs and the high prevalence of iatrogenic disease.
Fisher P. (2012). What is homeopathy? An introduction. Frontiers in bioscience (Elite edition), 4(5), 1669–1682. https://doi.org/10.2741/489
