Pharmacist

Until the advent of Samuel Hahnemann, pharmacology was a purely empirical science, based partly on traditional knowledge, but also largely on imaginary elements. The processes that appeared to take place in the human body—in health and disease—were forced into systems devised by individual minds based on their observations.

According to L. Hoffmann, most illnesses were caused by putrid and acidic fluids that had to be removed. According to Kämpf, illnesses were located in the abdomen and were caused by ‘infarctions’. John Brown’s philosophy was very popular. He claimed to have been the first to scientifically define pharmacology as a ‘science of nature’. According to him, every person had a certain degree of excitability. A proper balance of this promised health. An excess (sthenia) or deficiency (asthenia) meant illness. The physician had to regulate excitability and did so with sthenic and asthenic medicines. Reducing irritations included bloodletting, cold, vomiting, purgatives, and sweating. Sthenic remedies included meat, warmth, and the prevention of vomiting, purging, and sweating through meat-based diets, spices, wine, exercise, or, for more powerful measures, musk, camphor, ether, and opium. Knowledge of anatomy was of lesser importance. A doctor therefore only needed to know three things at the bedside: Is the disease local or general? If general, is it sthenic or asthenic? How severe is the disease? And now all that’s needed is a treatment plan with the appropriate medication/therapy. A diagnosis was unnecessary.

At the same time, natural philosophers were booming. They explained things like “Magnetism is the transformation of oxygen and hydrogen into carbon and nitrogen” or “Oxygen is the principle of electricity” . Even Alexander von Humboldt was among the natural philosophers.
In the middle of the 18th century (Hahnemann had just been born), the scholar Haller wrote: “Blood consists of equal parts, coagulates, and is redder the better fed the animal is; in a weak, hungry animal it is yellowish…” In 1789, Blumenbach wrote: “Blood is a fluid of its kind, of a known color, sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker, sticky to the touch, warm and is to be counted among the secrets of nature” . 1803: “Blood consists of nine parts: the odorous substance, the filamentous substance, albumin, sulfur, jelly, iron, lye, sodium, and water. The basic elements are hydrogen, carbon, nitrate, the basic element of hydrochloric acid, phosphorus, sulfur, oxygen, lime, and iron .” This was a modest step forward from today’s perspective, but nevertheless enormous for the conditions of the time.

A professor named Reich extorted a substantial annual pension of 500 thalers from the King of Prussia by revealing his secret fever remedy. A family of five needed around 180 thalers a year at the time. The remedy was supposed to ‘suddenly cure’ the fever. In the fall of 1800, it became known: The fever remedy consisted of sulfuric acid and hydrochloric acid. Under certain circumstances, nitric acid might also work… A commission of physicians at the Charité Hospital found this ‘effective in a number of cases’.

There were numerous, varied treatment methods: strengthening, weakening, antagonistic, restorative, astringent, relaxant, derivatory, deobstructive, resolving, antimiasmatic, antiseptic, antigastric, and others – with corresponding remedies: sweetening, thinning, dissolving, thickening, blood purifying, cooling, purgative, mucus-cutting, etc. Often, 8-10 of these were mixed in one prescription. As a result, doctors were deeply divided, frustrated, and felt abandoned in their art. Why didn’t remedies work? And if they did, what was healing about the medicine? Why was the effect of the remedy always variable and unpredictable?

Hahnemann fared no better. But he himself sought solutions to the dilemma. From chemistry, he knew the principle: administered two medicines simultaneously do not produce two individual effects, but a third, combined effect. So Hahnemann began a reform in his practice, which he also proposed in articles in medical journals: to administer only one remedy at a time. This had long been common practice among ordinary people with their own traditional home remedies. Hahnemann developed a system out of it. He and other willing volunteers took PURE, unmixed medicines on a healthy body (as Dioscorides had done in the 1st century!) and observed the changes in themselves. He was the first in medical history to explore the PURE effects of substances on humans and to collect the ‘poisoning stories’. In 1805, he wrote his first, two-part pharmacopoeia, written in Latin, in which he systematically and meticulously organized his findings over 739 pages. Samuel Hahnemann used this database for his new, patient-tailored – i.e. individualized – drug therapy, which he developed simultaneously until 1810 and then presented in his Organon of Rational Medicine.