Abstract
By means of a historical, classical philological and philosophical approach, this
paper attempts to demonstrate that homeopathy is based on three powerful traditions
of thinking, which can be traced back to Ancient Greece's pre-Socratic era. Actually,
it seems to be constituted by what may be termed lógos-, hómoion- and iásthai-thinking: that is, thinking in terms of rationality, similarity and healing. By contrast,
modern medicine tends to be aligned with just one of these traditions, at the expense
of the others, this being not without risk and adverse effects. It is mainly determined
by the first type of rationality that genealogically derives from, and is therefore
compatible with, the logic of economics whose predominance in the health care systems
of modern societies is progressively rising. Homeopathy, however, may not be sufficiently
and fairly understood without taking into account the complementary forms of thinking
on which it also rests, such as the principle of similarity in an all-encompassing
sense, and ancient healing knowledge in the tradition of catharsis. As a corollary
of being essentially constituted by the three, homeopathy may persistently be in need
of a dynamic equilibrium of its three constituent bases. Attempts to approach homeopathy
from only one of the indicated modes of thinking fail to grasp its essence and result
in figments or caricatures of what homeopathy was originally meant to be.
Keywords
history of medicine - theory of medicine - history of knowledge - homeopathy - philosophy
