Homeopathy began with one doctor's doubts about a textbook in eighteenth-century Germany. Within a few decades it had reached Paris, Philadelphia and Lahore, and by the late nineteenth century it had found one of its most devoted homes in Bengal. This is a short account of that journey, from Samuel Hahnemann's study to the homeopathic chambers found today in towns and villages across Bangladesh.
Samuel Hahnemann, a doctor who doubted
Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann was born on 10 April 1755 in Meissen, a town in Saxony known for its porcelain. His family was not wealthy, but he was a gifted student with a talent for languages. He studied medicine in Leipzig and Vienna and received his medical degree from the University of Erlangen in August 1779.
Medicine at the time relied on bloodletting, purging and large doses of strong substances. Hahnemann became deeply uneasy about these methods. Around 1784 he largely stepped away from practice and supported his growing family by writing and translating medical and scientific works. It was a hard life, with frequent moves from town to town, but it gave him a wide reading of the medicine of his time.
His birthday, 10 April, is now marked by homeopaths around the world as World Homoeopathy Day.
The cinchona experiment and the 1796 essay
In 1790 Hahnemann was translating A Treatise on the Materia Medica by the Scottish physician William Cullen. Cullen explained that cinchona bark, the Peruvian bark from which quinine was later extracted, cured intermittent fever (malaria) because of its bitter and astringent properties. Hahnemann was not satisfied with this explanation. Other substances were just as bitter, yet did not have the same effect.
So he tried it on himself. Taking repeated doses of cinchona while in good health, he recorded symptoms that, to him, resembled those of the fever the bark was used to treat. From this he began to suspect that a medicine's healing power was connected to the symptoms it could produce in a healthy person.
He spent the next few years testing this idea on himself, his family and willing volunteers, an approach that became known as "proving". In 1796 he published his conclusions in Hufeland's Journal der practischen Arzneykunde, a respected German medical journal, in an essay usually translated as Essay on a New Principle for Ascertaining the Curative Powers of Drugs. Historians generally treat this essay as the starting point of homeopathy.
The Organon and its six editions
Hahnemann set out his complete system in 1810 in a book published in Dresden under the title Organon der rationellen Heilkunde, the "Organon of Rational Medicine". It is written as a series of numbered paragraphs, or aphorisms, and covers the principle of similars, the individual study of each patient, the preparation of medicines and the idea of a vital force.
He never stopped revising it. New editions appeared in 1819, 1824, 1829 and 1833, and the title changed to Organon der Heilkunst, the "Organon of the Healing Art". In 1828 he also published The Chronic Diseases, his theory of long-standing illness.
In 1821 Hahnemann settled in Köthen, where the local duke allowed him to practise and to dispense his own medicines. After the death of his first wife, he married Mélanie d'Hervilly, a French artist, and in June 1835 the couple moved to Paris. There he ran a busy practice until his death on 2 July 1843, aged 88. In 1898 his remains were moved to the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
The sixth edition of the Organon has an unusual story. Hahnemann finished his annotated manuscript in 1842, but it remained unpublished for nearly eighty years. It finally appeared in 1921, edited by Richard Haehl, and an English translation by William Boericke followed. It introduced a new scale of dilution, the LM or Q potencies, which some homeopaths still use today.
Across Europe and to America
Even in Hahnemann's lifetime, his students and patients carried homeopathy through the German states and into France, Britain and beyond. It attracted devoted followers, and it also drew sharp criticism from many doctors, a pattern that has continued ever since.
Homeopathy reached the United States in the 1820s. Its most important figure there was Constantine Hering, born in Saxony on 1 January 1800. He arrived in America in 1833 and settled in Philadelphia. In the mid-1830s he helped establish a homeopathic academy in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and he later helped found the Homoeopathic Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Hering is also remembered for introducing Lachesis, a remedy prepared from snake venom. He died in Philadelphia in 1880 and is often called the father of American homeopathy.
A generation later came James Tyler Kent (1849 to 1916). His Repertory of the Homoeopathic Materia Medica, published in 1897, organised thousands of symptoms and the remedies associated with them into a practical index. His Lectures on Homoeopathic Philosophy followed in 1900. Kent's books became, and remain, standard texts in homeopathic colleges in India and Bangladesh.
Arrival in the subcontinent
The first well-known homeopath in India was Johann Martin Honigberger, a physician and traveller from Kronstadt in Transylvania (now Brașov in Romania). He reached Lahore in 1829 and served at the court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. During a stay in Europe in the 1830s he learned homeopathy, and he returned to Lahore at the Maharaja's request at the end of the decade. Indian histories of homeopathy often credit him with treating Ranjit Singh himself, who died in 1839. Honigberger later moved to Calcutta, where he studied cholera, and in 1852 he published his memoir in English as Thirty-five Years in the East.
Other early centres followed. Surgeon Samuel Brooking is recorded as founding a homeopathic hospital in Tanjore in South India in 1847. But it was Calcutta, then the capital of British India, that became homeopathy's real home in the subcontinent.
Bengal takes homeopathy to heart
In the 1860s Rajendralal Dutt, a wealthy Calcutta layman with no formal medical degree, began treating patients with homeopathy, including during an epidemic of fever in lower Bengal. He spent much of his fortune on this and on other charitable work, and he is often called the father of Indian homeopathy.
His most famous convert was Mahendralal Sarkar (1833 to 1904). Sarkar was one of the most distinguished Indian doctors of his day: he had earned the MD degree from Calcutta in 1863. Influenced by Dutt and by his own reading, he became convinced of homeopathy and said so openly at a meeting of the Bengal branch of the British Medical Association. His colleagues ostracised him and his practice suffered for a while, but he rebuilt it. In January 1868 he started the Calcutta Journal of Medicine. Sarkar is also remembered for founding the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science in 1876, and for treating Sri Ramakrishna in his final illness.
Homeopathy spread quickly through Bengal, helped by its low cost and by Bengali-language books. In the 1880s P. C. Majumdar and colleagues founded the Calcutta Homoeopathic Medical College, one of many institutions that trained practitioners across the region.
From East Bengal to Bangladesh
East Bengal, which became East Pakistan and then Bangladesh, shared this tradition. In 1948 the Bangladesh Homoeopathic Medical College and Hospital was established in Dhaka as a private institution, often described as the first formal homeopathic college in what is now Bangladesh.
After independence, the Bangladesh Homoeopathic Practitioners Ordinance of 1983 set the framework for registration through a Homoeopathic Board. In 1989 the government established the Government Homoeopathic Degree College in Dhaka, offering the Bachelor of Homoeopathic Medicine and Surgery (BHMS). In November 2023 Parliament passed the Bangladesh Homeopathic Medical Education Bill, which repeals the 1983 Ordinance and replaces the board with a council responsible for education, registration and standards.
Across the border, India developed its own national structures: the Central Council of Homoeopathy under a 1973 Act, the Central Council for Research in Homoeopathy in 1978, and since July 2021 the National Commission for Homoeopathy.
Homeopathy has always had critics, and its scientific basis remains debated. Large reviews such as the 2015 report of Australia's National Health and Medical Research Council found no reliable evidence of effectiveness beyond placebo, a conclusion that homeopathy researchers have contested. Whatever one's view, its history in Bengal is a remarkable one, shaped by doctors, scholars and ordinary families over more than a century and a half.
Cover photo: Photo by Fabian Kleiser on Unsplash
