A brief history of homeopathy
secondary literature · 2006
LINK
SUMMARY
Peer-reviewed historical essay by the medical historian Irvine Loudon, used in this case as the principal secondary source for Hahnemann's life and doctrine. It supports: birth in Meissen in 1755 and a medical degree from Erlangen in 1779; the cinchona ('the bark', i.e. quinine) self-experiment and the resulting 'like cures like' principle of similars; the 1796 'Essay on a New Principle for Ascertaining the Curative Powers of Drugs' and the 1810 Organon; the doctrine that diluted medicines retain power through a process Hahnemann called 'potentization', persisting (in Loudon's words) as a 'dematerialized spiritual force'; and the statement that Hahnemann 'died a millionaire in Paris in 1843'. Identifiers copied from PubMed (PMID 17139061) and Crossref (DOI 10.1177/014107680609901206): J R Soc Med, volume 99, issue 12, pages 607-610, December 2006, author Irvine Loudon.
NOTES
Loudon’s 2006 essay in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine is the peer-reviewed historical reference used throughout this case for Hahnemann’s biography and the structure of his doctrine. It is the source for his birth at Meissen in 1755, his 1779 Erlangen medical degree, the cinchona self-experiment that produced the principle of similars, the 1796 essay and 1810 Organon, the concept of potentization by which extreme dilutions were held to retain a ‘dematerialized spiritual force’, and the summary fact that Hahnemann ‘died a millionaire in Paris in 1843’. The bibliographic metadata are copied from the deterministic PubMed and Crossref records (PMID 17139061; DOI 10.1177/014107680609901206; J R Soc Med 99(12):607-610, 2006).