Homeopathy was a revolution in medical thought and practice developed by Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann. Hahnemann was a German physician born in 1755 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 founded homeopathy as a system of prescribing based on using symptoms as the external manifestation of internal (invisible) disease.

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 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.

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