The Life and Letters of Dr. Samuel Hahnemann

Excerpt from The Life and Letters of Dr. Samuel Hahnemann

In 1847, Dr. Constantine Hering, the Father of American Homœopathy, published in the Hygea an article, entitled "Requisites to a Correct Estimate of Hahnemann." In this he wrote that in order to worthily estimate the character of this man, belonging to history, it would be necessary to mention the age in which he lived; to depict the life at Meissen, the home life, the school days, the artist-father and the mother, the early training of the boy. After this to describe the life and labors up to 1790, the year of the discovery of the New Law of Healing, and then:

"The foundation being thus laid, and the man presented to us in his daily life, his thoughts and his labors, his time and his contemporaries, the second and most important part would be devoted to the consideration of his new opinions, and a statement of the origin and gradual development, step by step, of Homœopathy. From the note in Cullen's "Materia Medica," through all his subsequent writings, and even through the successive editions of the "Organon," the materials must be industriously sought and carefully brought together down to the latest words of the expiring sage.

"Through the whole of this, criticism should be silent, no partisanship should divert shallow readers with straight laced conventionalities, the day-spring of the discoverer's thought should appear in its true primordial form, in its progress and in its growth, exempt from all cavil.

"After his writings, after his published and his various unpublished correspondence and other productions, the inner moral state of the man, the heart and feelings must be developed as the hidden spring of all. Here, where, for us as for all men, lies the danger of error; yea, the greatest danger, that of being unjust-and where we would, least of all, dare to be unjust-here the greatest watchfulness and most rigorous care are but requirements of the lowest and commonest duty. Nothing in the shape of testimony should here be omitted, not, however, what others have said of him, but what he has said of himself and of others.

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