It was in the year 1790 that he first broached the idea, which is the great principle of the Homœopathic system, and which he soon dreamed was to overturn and dispossess all other medical practice. He viewed himself as a great reformer, as the founder of a system, and he was soon ready to proclaim to the world, that his was the ‘great gift of God to man.’ Discarding all the past experience of ages as useless, with his mind filled with bright visions of his future greatness, he was ready to say with Paracelsus, ‘the monarchy of physic is mine.’ In 1796 he published his first paper on the subject of Homœopathy, in 1805 his first work, in 1810 his famous Organon, and the next year his Materia Medica. He died in Paris at an advanced age, only a few years since, having lived to see his system adopted very extensively all over Europe. It will not be necessary to spread before the reader the principles of his system in his own language. There is in his statement of them considerable verbiage, which has quite a learned air, but which would be unintelligible to the common reader. The essential principles of his system are but two in number, when the mass of words comes to be sifted by a little plain common sense. The great principle, which lies at the foundation of this system, and which has given it its name, is found in the Latin aphorism, _Similia similibus curantur_. This is in homely English, Like things are cured by like. In other words, a disease is cured by remedies which produce upon a healthy person symptoms similar to those presented by that disease. Thus vomiting is to be cured by a nauseant, diarrhœa by a laxative, &c. Hahneman does not pretend that this is a newly-discovered principle, but says that it has been acted upon from time immemorial. Of this fact the following examples are given. Senna has been used for colic; rhubarb for diarrhœa; thorn apple for insanity; the sweating sickness has been treated by sudorifics, frozen limbs by rubbing in snow, and burns by putting them to the fire and by stimulating ointments. So Shakspeare alludes to the same fact; “Tut, man! one fire burns out another’s burning, One pain is lessened by another’s anguish; Turn giddy and be holp by backward turning; One desperate grief cures with another’s languish; Take thou some new infection to thine eye, And the rank poison of the old will die.” So also the common proverb ‘cure your bite with the hair of the same dog’ has reference to the same principle. All that Hahneman claims is, that he has taken this principle, thus occasionally recognized, and demonstrated its applicability to the whole range of disease, and made it the basis of a system of practice. Hahneman says that there can be but three relations of remedies to diseases—heterogeneity, opposition, and resemblance; hence severally, the Allopathic, Antipathic, and Homœopathic systems of practice.