Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann (1755 – 1843), a conventionally trained German physician was the founder of the system of therapeutics known as Homoeopathy.
Homeopathy, also spelled Homoeopathy, was founded on the principle that “like cures like,” similia similibus curantur, and the symptoms produced by any substance harmful (snake poison) or otherwise (red onion) on a healthy human, when the same symptoms observed on a sick person than the remedies Allium Cepa and Naja Tripudians generated from these two have the potential and ability to start healing the ailing person.
Samuel Hahnemann claimed that a large dose of quinine, which had been widely used for the successful treatment of malaria, produced in him effects similar to the symptoms of malaria patients. He thus concluded that all diseases were best treated by drugs that produced in healthy persons effects similar to the symptoms of those diseases. He also undertook experiments with a variety of drugs in an effort to prove this. Hahnemann believed that large doses of drugs aggravate illness and that the efficacy of medicines thus increases with dilution. Accordingly, most homoeopathists believed in the action of minute doses of medicine.
Valuing Tradition — we prefer to use the original spelling proposed by Hahnemann, the founder, who was also a linguist, as he chose the title of the new system of medicine purposefully. Homoeopathy comes from the Greek ‘homeois’ meaning similar or like, combined it with ‘pathos’ meaning suffering and putting the two together means ‘similar suffering.’ The word ‘homoeopathic’ first appeared in Hahnemann’s essay “Indications of the Homoeopathic Employment in Medicine in Ordinary Practice”, Hahnemann himself was quite sensitive about the spelling and he said in a Note Bene in the second volume of Materia Medica Pura and in footnote to a Note Bene in his Lesser Writings that the omission of the dipthong [œ] makes the root of the word mean ‘same’ and not ‘similar’. ‘Homoeis’ “cannot these persons feel the difference betwixt ‘identical’ and ‘similar'”. Thus we use Homoeopathy!