A short history of homeopathy

From one physician's experiment with cinchona bark in 1790 to hospitals and colleges on four continents. Each entry opens to a longer note with its sources. Dates where sources disagree are marked.

Origins in Saxony

1. 1755Samuel Hahnemann is born in Meissen

   Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann, son of a porcelain painter, trains in medicine at Leipzig, Vienna and Erlangen (M.D. 1779). Dissatisfied with the bleeding and purging of his day, he gives up practice for a time and earns his living translating medical and chemical works.

   Sources: igm-bosch.de

2. 1790The cinchona experiment

   While translating William Cullen's Materia Medica, Hahnemann doubts Cullen's explanation of why Peruvian bark cures intermittent fever and takes repeated doses himself. He records fever-like symptoms and notes it in a footnote: the first recorded 'proving', and the seed of the idea that a substance which produces symptoms in the healthy may relieve the same symptoms in the sick.

   Sources: igm-bosch.de · redux.whonamedit.com

3. 1796Essay on a New Principle

   In Hufeland's Journal Hahnemann publishes 'Essay on a New Principle for Ascertaining the Curative Powers of Drugs', the first public statement of similia similibus curentur. The word 'homeopathy' follows in 1807.

   Sources: en.wikipedia.org

4. 1810The Organon of Rational Healing

   The first edition of the Organon appears in Dresden while Hahnemann lives in Torgau. Five editions follow in his lifetime (the fifth in 1833 adds the doctrines of vital force and dynamisation); a sixth, revised in Paris, is published only in 1921. The Organon remains the foundational text of the method.

   Sources: en.wikipedia.org

5. 1811 – 1821Materia Medica Pura and the Leipzig years

   Hahnemann publishes the six volumes of Materia Medica Pura, the provings of the first remedies, and lectures at Leipzig from 1812. Conflict with the city's apothecaries, who held a monopoly on dispensing, drives him to Köthen in 1821 under the protection of Duke Ferdinand of Anhalt-Köthen.

   Sources: igm-bosch.de

6. 1833The first homeopathic hospital, Leipzig

   On 22 January 1833 a 24-bed homeopathic hospital opens in Leipzig under Moritz Müller, the first institution of its kind in Europe. Müller's willingness to combine homeopathy with other methods brings him into conflict with Hahnemann; the hospital closes for lack of funds in 1842.

   Sources: homeopathy-history.blogspot.com · sciencedirect.com

7. 1835 – 1843Paris and Hahnemann's death

   After marrying Mélanie d'Hervilly, Hahnemann moves to Paris in 1835, where he practises until his death on 2 July 1843. The following year, on his birthday, American homeopaths found the American Institute of Homeopathy in his memory.

   Sources: archivalcollections.drexel.edu

Spread through Europe and the Americas

1. 1833 – 1848Hering and the United States

   Constantine Hering, who had been sent to refute homeopathy and became its champion, settles in Philadelphia in 1833. The American Institute of Homeopathy is founded in 1844 with Hering as president (three years before the American Medical Association), and the Homoeopathic Medical College of Pennsylvania, later Hahnemann Medical College, opens in Philadelphia in 1848.

   Sources: en.wikipedia.org · drexel.edu

2. 1840 – 1843Brazil: Benoît Mure

   The French physician Benoît Jules Mure brings homeopathy to Brazil in November 1840 and founds the Instituto Homeopático do Brasil in Rio de Janeiro in 1843, serving as its president until 1848. He later carries the method to Egypt.

   Sources: en.wikipedia.org · redalyc.org

3. 1849London Homoeopathic Hospital

   Frederic Hervey Foster Quin, the first homeopathic physician in England, founds the London Homoeopathic Hospital in Golden Square, Soho; it admits its first patients in 1850 and moves to Great Ormond Street in 1859. It enters the National Health Service in 1948 as the Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital and, from 2010, continues as the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine. Bristol (1852 – 2015), Liverpool (1887) and Tunbridge Wells (closed 2009) follow the London model.

   Sources: uclh.nhs.uk · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org

4. 1893 – 1895Mexico: the Hospital Nacional Homeopático

   On 15 July 1893, with the backing of President Porfirio Díaz, Joaquín Segura y Pesado and colleagues open the Hospital Nacional de Medicina Homeopática in Mexico City; a decree of 31 July 1895 regulates its teaching. Mexico thereby becomes the first country to recognise homeopathic practice officially. The hospital still operates today in the Colonia Obrera.

   Sources: hnh.salud.gob.mx · gob.mx

5. 1897 – 1901The books on this site

   The great reference works that this library is built on appear within a few years of each other: Kent's Repertory (1897) and Lectures on Materia Medica (1905), Clarke's Dictionary of Practical Materia Medica (1900) and Boericke's Pocket Manual (1901), building on Hering's Guiding Symptoms (1879 – 1891), Allen's Keynotes (1899) and Nash's Leaders (1898).

   Sources: homeopathylibrary.com

India

1. 1839Honigberger at the court of Lahore

   John Martin Honigberger, a Transylvanian physician who had met Hahnemann in Paris, treats Maharaja Ranjit Singh in Lahore in 1839, the date Indian histories take as homeopathy's official arrival. Some accounts place a first visit as early as 1810. Homeopathy spreads through Bengal in the following decades, largely through lay practitioners and missionaries.

   Sources: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov · homeopathy.delhi.gov.in

2. 1867 – 1881Mahendra Lal Sircar and the Calcutta college

   Mahendra Lal Sircar, a leading Calcutta physician, publicly adopts homeopathy in 1867 at the cost of his standing in the medical establishment, and becomes the first Indian homeopathic physician. The Calcutta Homoeopathic Medical College, India's first, opens in 1881.

   Sources: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov · hmbup.in

3. 1973 – 2020A national system of medicine

   After an enquiry committee in 1948, the Government of India recognises homeopathy as a national system of medicine and creates the Central Council of Homoeopathy in 1973; the National Commission for Homoeopathy Act replaces it in 2020. The Ministry of Ayush reported in 2025 some 345,000 registered homeopathic doctors, 277 hospitals, 8,593 dispensaries and 277 teaching institutions, making India by far the largest homeopathic community in the world.

   Sources: ianslive.in · ies.gov.in

Decline and revival

1. 1910The Flexner Report

   Abraham Flexner's report on American medical education, written for the Carnegie Foundation, sets standards that the homeopathic colleges cannot or will not meet. Of 22 homeopathic colleges in 1910, two remain by 1923 and one by 1950; Hahnemann Medical College survives but drops homeopathy from its curriculum. In the United States the method is in steep decline from the 1920s to the 1960s.

   Sources: drexel.edu · thieme-connect.com

2. 1970s onwardRevival

   From the 1970s homeopathy recovers strongly in the United States and Europe, in Greece largely through the teaching of George Vithoulkas and his academy, and the Hellenic Homeopathic Medical Society organises the Panhellenic congresses. Mexico, Brazil and India maintain state-recognised teaching and hospitals throughout; in the United Kingdom public funding narrows in the 2010s while the London hospital continues within the NHS as an integrated-medicine service.

   Sources: thieme-connect.com · en.wikipedia.org

This timeline is editorial, written for this site and checked against the sources linked under each entry. Where sources disagree (the date of homeopathy's arrival in India, the renaming of the London hospital) the entry says so. Corrections welcome.