Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann was born 10 April 1755 in Meissen, Saxony, German Empire, to Christian Gottfried and Anna Maria Hahnemann.

Samuel Hahnemann made important early contributions to the fields of homeopathy and pharmacology.

Hahnemann led an extraordinarily varied life as a writer, teacher, and medical scientist. After studying medicine at the Leipzig School of Medicine (1777–1780), he graduated from Erlangen-Nuremberg School of Medicine (MD, 1781).

After over 30 years of practicing medicine, he had a mid life crisis and became unhappy with conventional medicine of that time. He tried different methods including deliberate overdose, bloodletting, extreme dietary measures, and so on but at 45 years age none of his patients was cured.

Samuel Hahnemann 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.”

Finally, in 1784 he gives up his practice and made his living as a writer and translator. After researching Cinchona bark (quinine) for Malaria he felt a strange reaction at the spot where the Cinchona bark was applied on his body. He found out that when Cinchona bark (the tree from which quinine is obtained) is administered, the symptoms of malaria are reproduced in healthy persons. Homeopathy was created by Dr Hahnemann based on his belief that it is possible to cure illness by using remedies that cause a set of symptoms similar to those of the disease being treated, referred to as ‘similarity doctrine’.

In 1796, Dr Hahnemann has established the first homeopathic society in Leipzig. He is as well the first person to describe the principle of similars and the beginners of a new branch of healing, which will be named Homeopathy. Dr Samuel Hahnemann is the inventor of homeopathy but he owes his debt to others, not only in his time but many others from thousands of years ago.

Dr Samuel Hahnemann wrote a number of books, essays, and letters on homeopathy, chemistry, and medicine. His most influential and important work has been The Organon of the Healing Art (1810; 5th edition 1833). This book became the foundational text of pharmacology by expressing, for the first time, a new scientific concept: "Like cures like." Other important works include Chronic Diseases (1828), a study of chronic toxemia based on his theory of psora. He also compiled Apothekerlexikon and Reine Arzneimittellehre and many other scientific texts.

Dr Samuel Hahnemann continued practicing and researching homeopathy, as well as writing and lecturing for the rest of his life. On 2 July 1843, the founder of homeopathy in the modern era, died at the age of 89 in Paris.

Two hundred years have passed, but the principles of this pioneering work remain unchanged. Dr Samuel Hahnemann found the cause of several diseases — for example, malaria and yellow fever — in a drunken state, also known as delirium tremens. Also, he believed that not only the symptoms of the disease itself are treated with homeopathy, but also the symptoms of its opposite.