Simply, homeopathy is treating a disease using minute doses of a remedy that would produce symptoms of the disease in a healthy being. The basic premise of homeopathy is that the body’s natural state is one of health and that all living things have the ability to heal themselves. Once given a symptom, the body will naturally follow its own natural process of healing. Remedies, in the form of dilutions called tinctures, stimulate that healing process. A brilliant German physician, Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843), is credited with being the founding father of homeopathy. Hahnemann, who learned 14 languages so that he could read every medical book available, was truly a maverick in his time. He challenged acceptable medical treatments of the day, many rife with superstition, that he perceived to be barbaric, lacking scientific rationale, or more harmful than effective.
Treatments such as blood-letting, blistering plasters, and purging were common practices he criticized. Hahnemann found the treatment of the insane to be cruel, and instead he classified the behavior of mental patients as a disease, advocating humane methods of treatment. Things we take for granted today like hygiene were revolutionary in his day, and something Hahnemann insisted was integral in medical procedures and to good health. One day, while translating William Cullen's A treatise of the materia medica into German, Hahnemann was struck by Cullen’s explanation on how quinine (commonly extracted from cinchona bark) abetted malaria. Hahnemann thought this was so ridiculous that he ingested quinine only to find that he developed the symptoms of malaria though not the disease itself.
This was a breakthrough moment. He thought if quinine in large doses triggers a semblance of malaria in a healthy person, maybe a smaller dose would repel malaria from a person who had it. This principal is referred to as the "Law of Similars" and is the basis for the term homeopathy (literally translated to "similar suffering"). Or, finally…like cures like! For years, Hahnemann tested one natural product after another on healthy volunteers called “provers.” Every time a “prover” reported symptoms similar to one disease or another, he would then try the substance on people who had the disease. Sure enough, the “homeopathic” remedy repelled the disease. Hahnemann discovered that the more diluted the substance the more potent it became. At each stage of dilution, he would shake the vial vigorously. The shaking or “succussion” would disseminate the “energy” from the original drop of remedy to the diluent; and the more dilutions and successions that occurred, the higher the “potency” of the vials contents. The more diluted, the stronger the effect. He advocated reducing doses to infinitesimal levels by multiple serial dilutions of up to hundred-fold. When Napoleon’s army was hit by a typhoid epidemic, Hahnemann treated them with his remedies. Of 180 soldiers treated, all survived but one. In 1810, Hahnemann detailed 67 remedies in a treatise called the "Organon of Medicine." The sixth edition, published in 1921, is still considered the fundamental textbook on homeopathy today.