In the late 18th century doctors were probably killing as many patients as they cured with bloodletting and crude poisons used as medicines. A German doctor called Samuel Hahnemann developed a system of medicine based on lengthy observation and rigourous experimentation. This system came to be known as homoeopathy.

Hahnemann (1755 - 1843) was so dissatisfied with the current medical practice that he stopped practising medicine and turned his attention to translating medical text. (He was also a scholar, a chemist, a mineralogist, a botanist).
It was here, in the ancient texts, that he found references to the principal that ‘poison is the remedy for poison’. Hippocrates wrote ‘similia similibus curentur’, or ‘like is cured by like’ (a phrase quickly adopted by homoeopaths).

So Hahnemann dosed himself with cinchona bark (quinine) and found that the symptoms he developed were the same symptoms patients complained of who were later cured by cinchona. This was the first ‘’proving’. All provings of new remedies are still carried out on healthy people.

He went on to experiment with smaller and smaller doses and found that as the dose became more dilute it acted not only more gently, but also more thoroughly and more deeply.

Today, it is ironic that homoeopathy is often derided as unscientific by some of the medical establishment when in fact it was founded on purely scientific principles in the age of quackery in medicine.