Homoeopathy during one hundred years of LMHI (1925–2025) – Part 2

Abstract

Taking Hahnemann in his entirety, as a paradigmatic example of a true homoeopath, as a sound basis for a proper understanding of Homoeopathy, the “scientific-critical” school of homoeopaths seems to miss one constitutive part of Homoeopathy: its spiritual embedment into a greater frame of thinking and feeling. In fact, the greatest successes of Homoeopathy, in terms of popularisation, institutionalisation and implementation into social and cultural practice, were achieved in countries and periods open towards spiritual dimensions. This was the case in North America at the end of the 19th century, when James Tyler Kent propagated a Hahnemannian Homoeopathy inspired by Emanuel Swedenborg, and in India and Latin America in the 20th century, where Kentianism fell on fertile ground, later being elaborated into different innovative schools. In Europe and North America, the New Age Movement in the 1970s brought a temporary opening for spiritual and esoteric ideas – to be followed by a drawback into the “critical-scientific” approach, in the wake of evidence-based medicine in the 1990s. The founding of the LMHI 100 years ago by Pierre Schmidt and others proved to be crucial for the spreading and advancement of genuine Homoeopathy according to Hahnemann.