Homeopathy was "discovered" in the early 1800's by a German ,physician, Samuel Christian Frederick Hahnemann. Shortly after setting up practice, he became disillusioned with medicine, and with good reason. Eighteenth and nineteenth century physicians believed that sickness was caused by humors, or fluids, that had to be expelled from the body by every possible means. To achieve this end, patients were cauterized, blistered, purged, and bled. Hahnemann protested against these brutal and senseless methods, and his colleagues quickly denounced him. for heresy. He-was also opposed to the way doctors prescribed medicines. In those days it was customary to mix a great number of drugs in one prescription. In his book, "Who Is Your Doctor and Why?" Dr. Alonzo J. Shadman mentions having seen, in the Pharmacopoeia of 1875,:a prescription that contained fifty ingredients. Earlier, Hahnemanner's outspoken criticism of this "degrading commerce in prescription" naturally enraged the chemists, who were as powerful as our drug companies today, and they were to hound him all of his life.

Hahnemann gave up the practice of medicine and turned to medical translating as a livelihood. But he persisted in his lifelong goal-to discover "if God had not indeed given some law, whereby the diseases of mankind would be cured." His sense of frustration increased when one of his children became critically ill and he could do nothing for her.

It was while translating Lectures on the Materia Medica by William Cullen, a Scottish professor of medicine, that Hahnemann stumble on the key to curing sick people. In this work, the author claimed that cinchona bark, or quinine, cured intermittent fever (malaria) because of its astringent and bitter qualities. This explanation did not sound plausible to Hahnemann, who knew of other substances equally bitter, so he did a daring thing; he tested the medicine on himself

"I took by way of experiment, twice a day, four drachmas of good China (quinine). My feet, finger ends, etc. at first became cold; I grew languid and drowsy then my heart began to palpitate, and my pulse grew hard and small: intolerable anxiety. trembling. prostration throughout all my limbs; then pulsation, in the head, redness of my cheeks, thirst and, in short, all these symptoms which are ordinarily characteristic of intermittent fever, made their appearance, one after the other. yet without the peculiar chilly, shivering rigor. Briefly, even those symptoms which are of regular occurrence and especially characteristic as the stupidity of mind, the kind of rigidity in all the limbs, but above all the numb, disagreeable sensation, which seems to have its eat in the periosteum, over every bone in the body all these make their appearance. This paroxysm lasted two or three hours each time, and recurred if I repeated this dose, not otherwise; I discontinued it, and was in good health."

This was this first "proving," a testing of medicine on a healthy person. The symptoms Hahnemann developed corresponded exactly to the symptoms of malaria. Thus Hahnemann reasoned that malaria was cured by quinine, not because of its bitter taste but owing to the fact that the drug produces the of malaria in a healthy person.