Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann was a German physician who is credited for founding homeopathic medicine. He was born in 1755 on April 10th in Meissen, Saxony, Germany.

Hahnemann was a translator and teacher and mastered many languages. He began practicing as a doctor of medicine in 1781 after having received his doctor of medicine degree at the University of Erlangen in 1779.

Hahnemann came to quickly believe that the medicine of his day did as much harm as good, leading him to postulate the healing principle:

"that which can produce a set of symptoms in a healthy individual, can treat a sick individual who is manifesting a similar set of symptoms."

This principle, likes cure likes, became the first of a new medicinal approach which he called homeopathy. Hahnemann began practicing medicine again using homeopathic techniques, and this soon attracted other doctors.

Hahnemann founded homeopathy as a system of prescribing based on using symptoms as the external manifestation of internal (invisible) disease.  Hahnemann then matched the symptom picture to a remedy which, when given to healthy persons, produced the most similar symptom picture. Causality was eliminated from his system. However, two decades later, Hahnemann found he had to re-introduce causality into his ideas.

Homeopathy was a revolution in medical thought and practice. Homeopathy as a system of medicine has gone through several phases in its development.

Hahnemann rejected the allopathic attempt to find the cause of disease through dissection, chemical analysis, and endless theories. He ridiculed the allopathic battle cry, tolle causem (find the cause) and asserted that one could only know disease through the full individual symptoms of each sick person, the totality of symptoms. These were the language of the inner disturbance.

The first phase of homeopathy was the long period of preparation prior to Hahnemann's work. The concept of using medicines on the basis of similars, similia similibus, has a long lineage, back to the Hippocratic writings and even earlier, based on observation.

The second phase of homeopathy began with the rejection of allopathy (meaning, based on no guiding principles whatsoever) and antipathy (using the concept of contraries). The genius of Samuel Hahnemann was that he took one of several medical concepts, healing with similar substances, and provided convincing evidence that it was the natural law of cure.

The third phase of homeopathy began when Hahnemann, ever the perceptive and honest observer, noticed that despite brilliant and quick cures of his patients' ailments, their underlying state of health often continued to worsen.

The fourth phase of homeopathy is represented by Hahnemann's discovery and publication of his theory of chronic disease.

Before his death, Hahnemann (in 1810) wrote his Organon of the Medical Art, the first systematic treatise on the subject of Homeopathy.