Magazine content is available exclusively for TIME subscribers.Medicine: Homeopathy
In 1790, a pious German physician named Samuel Christian Friedrich Hahnemann tried to find out why quinine cured the chills and jitters of malaria. He swallowed several strong doses of quinine and was promptly seized with paroxysms very like malaria's. He tried quinine on his wife, son and four daughters: same results. Dr. Hahnemann decided that quinine cured malaria because it produced in the body a "counterfeit disease" with the same symptoms.
For the next six years, while living at times in desperate poverty, he tried doses of well-known drugs on...
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