The strange affair of the founder of homeopathy

10/12/2006

One of the clichés of romantic fiction is the rich, elderly roue pursuing and marrying a poor but beautiful young woman and their subsequent trials and tribulations.  How many writers of the genre have ever considered the opposite scenario - a rich and beautiful young woman seeking out, wooing and winning a frail professionally-disgraced 80 year old widower and whisking him off to a life of luxury and fame.

This most unlikely love story actually happened. The “lovers” involved were Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homoeopathy, and Melanie D’Herveilly Gohier.

 

She was a Frenchwoman, young and beautiful, rich and well connected, living an artistic and bohemian life in Paris. He was a failed medical revolutionary, an embittered old widower living under sufferance in the small German principality of Kothen having been compelled to leave his practice in nearby Leipzig in 1821 because of his homoeopathic work and his uncompromising antagonism to his medical contemporaries.

 

No one has ever satisfactorily explained why she should have sought him out, in 1834, travelling from Paris dressed as a man to the horror of his provincial German neighbours. What could she have seen in this frail octogenarian who had declared only a short while before “If I am to live yet a brief year I must observe my mode of life with absolute precision... travel has become impossible for me...” .

 

Whatever the explanation, within three months of their first meeting they were married and had travelled to Paris where they lived in some style.     Far from killing him the moves seemed to have given Hahnemann a new lease of life. That the marriage was not in name only is suggested by a phrase in a new will he made at the time which made provision for the situation “should my present wife bear me any children”.

 

Melanie set him up in a practice which flourished and brought Hahnemann and homoeopathy, the success and recognition he had sought all his life. He rapidly adapted to living in a luxurious house and a social round of parties, opera - going, and soirees where he was lionised. He, and the unqualified Melanie under his guidance, treated an increasing number of patients, rich and poor, on a “no cure no fee” basis (which infuriated the doctors and apothecaries in France as much as it had in his native Germany).

 

She, a talented artist, also found time to paint several portraits of her husband. He was able to pass on his homoeopathic theories, previously ridiculed by the German medical establishment, to visiting doctors from all over the world who now sought him out in Paris to listen and learn.  By the time he died in 1843 aged 88 years, homoeopathy was established virtually worldwide. Without this marriage homoeopathy and Hahnemann might well have died in obscurity in Kothen.

 

Melanie appears to have had a genuine affection for her elderly husband  as he had for her. In a letter in June 1836 he wrote to a friend “I am so happy in my present position as I never was before in my whole life.I have a highly educated wife who loves me dearly….her incessant care is only for me even to the most trifling details so that every wish of mine is fulfilled.

 

This year we have not been separated for a single hour….” Unfortunately there was no similar affection shown to the children of his first marriage.  This had lasted 48 years.  Because of his horror at the medical treatments given by his contemporaries and his freely expressed denigration of both methods and practitioners he had never held a job for long.

 

His first wife, Johanna, the daughter of a prosperous apothecary, had accompanied him all over Germany putting up with up with poverty, inadequate housing, and constant travelling. She bore him 10 children bringing them up according to his strict ideas and she and the children helped him with his homoeopathic provings. (It seems to have been an ill fated family.

 

One child was stillborn; one son was killed while a baby and another son had a mental breakdown; two daughters were murdered and two more died at an early age while three daughters were divorced!) He was never an easy man to get on with but when Johanna died in 1830 two of his daughters came to live with and look after him. They were distressed at his second marriage and tried unsuccessfully to prevent it. After the marriage none of his family ever saw him alive again though one daughter did attend his funeral.

 

When he left Germany for Paris he left what little property he had in trust for them but the trust went bankrupt and they got nothing. Melanie would not allow them to visit their father even when he was dying and after his death gave them no share of the considerable fortune he had made in France and willed to her. A sour note to end what should have been a fairy tale romance and made all the more strange and macabre by Melanie’s actions when her husband died.

A few days after his 88th birthday Hahnemenn died peacefully in his bed in the early hours of 2nd of July 1843.

Dr Georg Jahr one of the few German Homoeopathic doctors practising in Paris was sent for to certify the death and on his arrival he found Melanie lying in tears by the body of her husband. Over the next few days she requested and obtained permission from the police to keep her husband’s body in the house’ for up to 14 days’.

 

This was not to allow time for the friends he had made in Paris to come and view the body for she allowed no one to visit; nor was it to make suitably grand funeral arrangements . She made no public announcement of his death, issued no invitations to any of his many admirers to attend and the funeral arrangements made were the least expensive possible.

On 11th July 1843 he was buried in a public grave in Montmartre Cemetary in pouring rain and attended only by Melanie, Dr Le Thiere, a few of the house servants and perhaps the only bright spot in the mean little cortege - his daughter Amelie and her son Leopold. They had arrived in Paris the week before but Melanie had refused to let them in to see Samuel but she could not prevent them following the coffin to the cemetery.(Leopold went on to study medicine and eventually settled in practice in London).

There is no easy explanation why Melanie who had treated her elderly husband like a prince in life should have treated him like a pauper in death and then apparently forgotten him?

Post Script.The manner of Hahnemanns passing upset many of his followers and in 1898 it was decided that the founder of homoeopathy should be re-interred in the more prestigious Pere Lachaise Cemetary. The body was exhumed from its neglected Montmartre grave in the presence of distinguished visitors from Homoeopathic Societies all over Europe including Russia together with many from Britain and America. The body was identified by a wedding ring inscribed S H-M de H Kothen Janvier1835 and a letter from Melanie was found in his hand and a long plait of her hair was wound round his neck.

The body was taken across Paris to Pere Lachaise where it was re-interred with due pomp and ceremony.

Two years later a 14ft polished granite monument was erected over the grave with a bust of Hahnemann and the inscription: Hahnemann Fondateur de L’Homoeopathie.

This is just one of a series of essays on medical history in a book I have written called Lithotomy to Music published by Ignotus Press.

Dr Harold Selcon