In Search of the Later Hahnemann

Rima Handley, DPhil, FSHom. viii + 235 pages, including 9 double-page facsimile spreads, bibliography, indexes, threadsewn laminated limp binding, 216x138mm, ISBN 0906584353, 1997
£18.00 (UK postpaid £20.00)

A study of Hahnemann’s cases and prescribing methods in Paris, during the final phase of his life.
The material is drawn from his hitherto unknown casebooks of that period.
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This book is the story of Samuel Hahnemann's practice of homeopathy in Paris during the last years of his life. It is based on his actual casebooks, which up till now have been left substantially unexamined in a German library.

It was to Paris that Hahnemann had moved with his young second wife, Melanie, and here that he completed the second edition of his Chronic Diseases and the final revision of his major theoretical work, the Organon. We see him putting into practice the implications of his thinking on chronic disease, experimenting with some of the new remedies being developed by himself and others, and pushing his conception of the infinitesimal dose to undreamed-of lengths in the LM potency.

The whole range of his Paris patients appear in these pages, many of them famous, others obscure, and still others who had travelled from elsewhere in Europe and the Americas to seek his help. We see him grappling with the scourges of the time, such as consumption and the consequences of venereal disease, as well as with conditions which had been caused or further complicated by previous treatment.

Some of the cases are quoted at length, and there are nine double- page facsimile spreads of casenotes made either by Hahnemann alone or else in conjunction with Melanie. There are successful cures, but we also see him making mistakes, improvising, getting stuck and lost in his cases, yet always trusting in the process he had himself formulated. We see him as a whole person and witness the process of the learning and making of homeopathy.

Rima Handley taught medieval literature at the universities of London and Newcastle-upon-Tyne for several years. She subsequently trained and now practises both as a homeopath and a psychotherapist. She was the co- founder of the Northern College of Homeopathic Medicine in Newcastle. She has written three other books about homeopathy - A Homeopathic Love Story, a biography of Samuel Hahnemann and his wife Melanie, the first woman homeopath, Homeopathy for Women, and Homeopathy for Emotional Health.