Homoeopathy is a holistic system of medicine and was founded by a Christian Freidrich Samuel Hahnemann. He was born in Meissen, Saxony in Germany on 10th April 1755 to an impoverished middle-class family. His father, Christian Gottfried Hahnemann and mother, Johanna Christiana taught him to write and read. Samuel Hahnemann was the third child [of five] and his father was a porcelain painter.

At the age of twenty (1775), he enrolled at the University of Leipzig for higher studies in medicine. He became proficient at different languages, English, French, Latin Italian and Greek and started working at the University of Leipzig as a translator and teacher in languages.

From Leipzig he left for Vienna where the scope for medical studies was much higher. In 1779, he took his M.D. degree from Erlangen University. In 1781, Hahnemann began his practice as a doctor in Hettstedt in the county of Mansfeld, Saxony and shortly afterwards married Johanna Leopoldine Henriette Kuchler on 17th November, 1782 and with whom he had 11 children.

In early years as a doctor, he found that using the medicines and techniques available to the profession at the time, he was achieving a healing response in many of his patients. But in some cases, toxic effects of some of the medicines were also causing greater damage to the health of the patient than that would have been caused by the actual disease, even if left untreated. This bitter fact made him to withdraw from the medical profession in order to not contribute to the harm committed to humanity in the name of medicine and devoted himself to literary works.

In 1790, he was translating A Treatise on the Materia Medica by the Scottish physician William Cullen into German and while translating he came upon an idea which laid the first milestone in the establishment of the new system of Medicine – Homoeopathy. In this materia medica, he read that the drug, cinchona (Peruvian Bark), was effective in treating the malaria because it was bitter and had a stomach-strengthening properties.

Hahnemann was dissatisfied with this explanation and in order to know exactly what action cinchona did have on the human body he took "four good drams of Peruvian bark, twice a day for several days". Hahnemann discovered that this bark actually created malaria-like symptoms in his body and he concluded that it was the similarity of symptoms that produced the healing effect. He conducted many other similar experiments on himself and other individuals also with other medicines which were known to cure other diseases.

This incited the postulation of the first principle of homoeopathy: “Law of similars� or “like cures like.� Or can be stated as – That medicine can treat a sick individual who is experiencing a set of symptoms because it can produce a similar set of symptoms in a healthy individual.

Finally, he coined the term "homoeopathy" to describe this system of healing, deriving it from the Greek: homos (same) + pathos (suffering).

1796 is marked as a year of birth of homoeopathy, when this discovery was brought to light in “An Essay on a New Principle for ascertaining the curative powers of Drugs and some Examinations of the previous principles.� He put forward his approach of healing “Similia Similibus Curantur (Like cures like) in contrast to old established approach “Contraria Contrariis Curantur� (opposite cures opposite). Hahnemann practiced Homoeopathic medicine for almost 50 years until his death in 1843.