Homoeopathy Birth (2/2)

With a wide-spread reputation he now re-entered Leipzic, where a crowd of patients admirers flocked around him, and the flood-tide of fortune seemed at length to set in towards him.

However, this was not the effect they had. Hahnemann steadily pursued his course without condescending to notice the attacks of his adversaries, and in 1811 he published the first volume of the Pure Materia Medica, which contained the pathogeneses of the medicines he had been silently testing upon himself and friends, together with the symptoms he had culled from various records of poisoning by the same substances. His earnest with this time purpose of indoctrinating the rising generation of physicians in homeopathy, theoretically and practically; but this plan failing, he resolved to give a course of lectures upon the system to those medical men and students who wished to be instructed in it.

An edition of the Organon and five more volumes of Materia Medica appeared during this period, adding at once to his fame and to the perfection if his system, which began to attract the attention of many physicians and immense numbers of the educated and upper classes.

In 1827 he summoned to Coethen his two oldest and most esteemed disciples, Drs. Stapf and Gross, and communicated to them his theory of the origin of chronic diseases and his discovery of a completely new series of medicaments for their cure, exhorting them to test the reality of his opinions and discoveries in their own practice. The next year the first and seconds volumes of celebrated work on Chromic Diseases, their peculiar nature and homeopathic treatment, appeared. The doctrines peculiar therein inoculated were not received with implicit faith by all his disciples, for whilst some professed to perceive in them a discovery equal if not superior to that of the homeopathic therapeutic law, others were not satisfied that the deductions arrived at were justified by the facts on which they were professedly based. To Hahnemann’s opponents his doctrine diseases was a fertile and inexhaustible theme for ridicule and obloquey which he as usual paid no attention to, thought his followers had become too numerous that they began to take up the cudgels in their master’s defense, and the medical press of Germany groaned with polemical articles respecting homeopathic from both sides, of more or less ability. Since the year 1822 the homeopathic had a quarterly journal, that contained many able and vigorous articles in support of Hahnemann’s doctrines. A third , a forth , and a fifth volume of the Chronic Diseases, containing extensive and valuable provings of new medicines, successively appeared during the following two years. The volume of these works can scarcely be over-estimated. And they, with the Materia Medica, constitute the inexhaustible treasury on which the homeopathic practitioner draws for the cure and relief of many diseases in which the allopathic appliances are important or hurtful.

On the 10^th August, 1829, a large concourse of his disciples and admirers assembled at Coethen, for the purpose of celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of his reception of the Doctor’s degree, and the dull little town was enlivened for a moment by the festivities of which it was the scene. The same day Hahnemann solemnly found the first Homeopathic Society., under the name of the "Central Society of German Homeopathists," which exists and flourishes to this day and by whose exertions it was that the bronze statue was last year (1851) erected at Leipzic, as a grateful memento to its illustrious founder.

The success of homeopathic, which now began to spread beyond the limits of German, and to make its was way in other countries of Europe and in , increased the bitterness and ferocity of the attacks of the partisans of the old school. They at length roused even of forbearance of Hahnemann, who published a pamphlet against his foes entitled "Allopathy; a Warning to all Sick Persons," which, though undoubtedly a gross caricature of the system, he turns into ridicule, has like all good caricatures, an unmistakable though ludicrous likeness to the original in every feature, which must have rendered its sting all the more pungent.

Hahnemann survived his last migration to Paris eight years and died there full of years and honour, at the age of eighty nine, on the 2^nd July, 1843.

He was buried in the cemetery of Montmartre, and his body was attended to the grave by only four of his nearest relatives. We might have wished that a man, who had acted such an important part in the world’s history, had a less meager attendance to his last resting place.

The homoeopathic principle, as a law of therapeutics, is an immutable law of nature, and is altogether independent of any individual; but the homoeopathic system, or the doctrines and technicalities that have been agglomerated round that principle, bears the impress of the personality- the individuality of its author.