The principle of similars is the foundational claim of homeopathy, the rule by which remedies are selected. Hahnemann first published it in 1796, generalizing from his report that cinchona bark produced fever-like symptoms when he dosed himself while healthy, and made it the organizing principle of the 1810 Organon. The claim is mechanism-only: it is a rule for matching remedy to disease, not a measured outcome. It is classified as unreplicated rather than refuted because the rule itself functions as a selection heuristic whose validity was never established by controlled outcome evidence; what controlled testing has refuted is the further claim that remedies chosen this way and given in potentized high dilution cure beyond placebo (see homeopathy-cures-beyond-placebo). No body of blinded, controlled evidence shows that drugs selected by the law of similars cure the diseases whose symptoms they are said to mimic.