Homoeopathy is a system of medical practice that originated with the work of the German physician Doctor Samuel Hahnemann.
Master Hahnemann was an experienced orthodox physician and also a competent chemist, a good mineralogist and botanist, and an able translator of eight different languages. He discovered that patients with certain diseases could be cured with substances that produce similar toxic effects.
e.g. cholera could be cured with a dose of arsenic, scarlet fever with a dose of belladonna etc. He termed this principle ‘similia similibus curentur’ – ‘let likes be cured by likes’, otherwise known as the ‘similia principle’ or ‘law of similars’. Although the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates – the founder of western medicine – was the first one to moot the idea of curing ‘like with like’ more than 2,000 years ago, it was Hahnemann who made this principle into a system of treatment.