HAHNEMANN, SAMUEL CHRISTIAN FRIEDRICH (1755-1843), German physician and founder of "homoeopathy," was born at Meissen, Saxony, on April io, 1755. He studied medi cine at Leipzig and Vienna and settled in Leipzig in 1789. In the following year, while translating W. Cullen's Materia medica into German, he was struck by the fact that the symptoms produced by quinine on the healthy body were similar to those of the disordered states it was used to cure. This observation led him to assert the truth of the "law of similars," similia similibus curantur or curentur—z.e., diseases are cured (or should be treated) by those drugs which produce symptoms similar to them in the healthy. He promulgated his new principle in a paper pub lished in 1796 in C. W. Hufeland's Journal, and four years later, convinced that drugs in much smaller doses than were generally employed effectually exerted their curative powers, he advanced his doctrine of their potentization or dynamization. His chief work, Organon der rationellen Heilkunde (181o), contains an ex position of his system, which he called homoeopathy (q.v.). His Reine Arzneimittellehre (six vols., 1811) detailed the symptoms produced by "proving" a large number of drugs; i.e., by syste matically administering them to healthy subjects. In 1821 the hostility of established interests, and especially of the apothe caries, forced him to leave Leipzig, and at the invitation of the grand duke of Anhalt-Cothen he went to live at Cothen. Four teen years later he removed to Paris, where he practised until his death on July 2, 1843. Statues were erected to his memory at Leipzig in 1851 and at Cothen in 1855. His other works are: Fragmenta de viribus medicamentorum positivis (1805) and Die clironischen Krankheiten (1828-30).
See the article HOMOEOPATHY ; also Albrecht, Hahnemann's Leben and Werken (Leipzig, 1875) ; Bradford, Hahnemann's Life and Letters (Philadelphia, 1895).