Here is his story....

Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann was a doctor, chemist and translator. In 1781, he was a village doctor in the copper-mining area of Mansfeld, Saxony.

During his years as a doctor he was dissatisfied with the state of medicine particularly objected to practices such as bloodletting and claimed that the medicine he had been taught to practice sometimes did the patient more harm than good..here is what he said, "My sense of duty would not easily allow me to treat the unknown pathological state of my suffering brethren with these unknown medicines. The thought of becoming in this way a murderer or malefactor towards the life of my fellow human beings was most terrible to me, so terrible and disturbing that I wholly gave up my practice in the first years of my married life and occupied myself solely with chemistry and writing."

Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann

10 April 1755 – 2 July 1843

Its been said that following his sons death he was so disillusioned with medicine that he gave medical practice in 1784, and began translating books. As he worked on translating scientific and medical textbooks, he travelled around Saxony. For several years, he lived in many different towns and villages but never living far from the River Elbe; he settled at different times in Dresden, Torgau, Leipzig and Köthen and later in life in Paris.

While translating William Cullen's A Treatise on the Materia Medica, Hahnemann came across the claim that cinchona, the bark of a Peruvian tree, was effective in treating malaria because of its astringency. This statement was very strange as no other known astringent substance(s) are not effective against malaria and then began his research of cinchona's effect on the human body by self-application.

Upon self-medicating himself with this bark he noted that the bark induced malaria-like symptoms in him. He thereafter postulated the healing principle: "that which can produce a set of symptoms in a healthy individual, can treat a sick individual who is manifesting a similar set of symptoms." Homeopathy was born on The principle of like cures like (Read more in - Indications of the Homeopathic Employment of Medicines in Ordinary Practice, published in Hufeland's Journal in 1807).He continued to look for other examples of substances that could cause symptoms similar to diseases; he conducted experiments and soon discovered that the principle worked!

He found that crude substances had side-effects, so he tried diluting them. and to his amazement this not only remove the unwanted side effects but the remedies also continued to work. The method of diluting the medicines was not conventional either. He wasn't just diluting, he was also repeatedly banged the remedy hard on a firm surface at each stage of dilution, it was this that made the difference, this he called 'dynamisation'; which today homeopaths refer to as 'potentising'.

He started his practice again, this time using only homeopathy. It was soon thereafter that other Doctors, who were skeptical at first, became his students and staunchest supporters!