In his
Organon of Medicine
1 the founder of homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann, writes that it is ‘the physician's highest and only mission […] to restore the
sick to health, to cure, as it is termed’ (§1). ‘The highest ideal of cure’, Hahnemann adds, ‘is rapid, gentle and permanent
restoration of the health, or removal and annihilation of the disease in its whole extent, in the shortest, most reliable,
and most harmless way, on easily comprehensible principles’ (§2). At first glance, the fact that Hahnemann emphasizes here
the physician's role in healing patients would seem to contradict the widely held naturopathic notion that ‘the physician
treats, nature heals’, or ‘medicus curat, natura sanat’.
A closer look at Hahnemann's writings, however, reveals that this is not the case. Hahnemann clearly also subscribed to the
idea that ‘nature’ plays an important, if not essential, role in the healing process. In the Pure Materia Medica Hahnemann writes ‘that nature hides within her cornucopia of medicinal substances an abundance of power that is almost unlimited
if it is properly revealed and elaborated’.