Materia medica pura vols 1-6 (alpha sort)

Samuel Hahnemann in the second half of the 18th century, has always had a strong and devoted following by a small minority of doctors—men who were so convinced of its efficacy that they continued to treat their patients on homoeopathic lines, and to ignore the scoffs of their colleagues. The principle behind homoeopathy is extremely simple. It is that a drug which will produce the symptoms of a disease in a normal healthy person will cure that same disease in a person suffering from it. Similia similibus curantur is often referred to as the law where ‘like cures like’. It is worth recalling how Hahnemann came to discover the principle with which his name will always be associated. Studying a treatise on Materia Medica by an English physician named Cullen, of which he produced his own translation, he was profoundly dissatisfied with the explanation given of how Cinchona cured ague. So he decided to take strong doses of the drug, as were prescribed by physicians of the day. He was astonished to find himself suffering from acute attacks of ague, such as occur in malarial cases. From that point he went on to test various substances, one at a time, and to note the effect they had on him. In every case he found himself suffering from symptoms of the disease for which the substance was ordinarily prescribed. Following up the work of the Viennese physician Anton von Störck, Samuel Hahnemann tested substances for the effects they produced on a healthy individual, presupposing (as von Störck had claimed) that they may heal the same ills that they caused. His researches led him to agree with von Störck that the toxic effects of ingested substances are often broadly parallel to certain disease states, and his exploration of historical cases of poisoning in the medical literature further implied a more generalised medicinal "law of similars". He later devised methods of diluting the drugs he was testing in order to mitigate their toxic effects. He claimed that these dilutions, when prepared according to his technique of "potentization" using dilution and succussion (vigorous shaking), were still effective in alleviating the same symptoms in the sick. His more systematic experiments with dose reduction really commenced around 1800–01 when, on the basis of his "law of similars," he had begun using Ipecacuanha for the treatment of coughs and Belladonna for scarlet fever. He first published an article about the homeopathic approach in a German-language medical journal in 1796. Following a series of further essays, he published in 1810 "Organon of the Rational Art of Healing", followed over the years by four further editions entitled The Organon of the Healing Art, the first systematic treatise and containing all his detailed instructions on the subject. A 6th Organon edition, unpublished during his lifetime, and dating from February 1842, was only published many years after his death. It consisted of a 5th Organon containing extensive handwritten annotations. The Organon is widely regarded as a remodelled form of an essay he published in 1806 called "The Medicine of Experience", which had been published in Hufeland's Journal. Of the Organon, Robert Ellis Dudgeon states it "was an amplification and extension of his "Medicine of Experience", worked up with greater care, and put into a more methodical and aphoristic form, after the model of the Hippocratic writings."