502 



HAHNEMANN 



HAIDTJK 



carriage making, and the manufacture of gold and 

 silver lace. Pop. (1875) 100,254; (1893) 174,790. 

 From 1250 a hunting-lodge of the Counts of Hol- 

 land, The Hague did not acquire importance until 

 the 16th century : in 1527 it became the seat of the 

 supreme court in Holland, in 1584 the place of 

 assembly of the States of Holland and of the 

 States-general ; and it was also the residence of the 

 stadtholders. There, too, numerous treaties have 

 been signed and diplomatic conferences held, 

 especially the Triple Alliance of 1668 and that of 

 1717. 



Hahnemann, CHRISTIAN FRIEDRICH SAMUEL, 

 the founder of the homeopathic method of treat- 

 ment (see HOMEOPATHY), was born at Meissen, 

 in Saxony, April 10, 1755. Educated at the gram- 

 mar-school of Meissen, he entered the university of 

 Leipzig at the age of twenty ; and it was by teach- 

 ing and translating books written in English, 

 French, Italian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic 

 that he supported himself while at the university. 

 The reputation he had made for himself as a 

 scholar while at Meissen procured for him a free 

 admission to the university classes. From Leipzig 

 he proceeded to Vienna for clinical study, where he 

 was the favourite pupil of Von Quarin, physician to 

 the Emperor Joseph. He then passed two years as 

 physician and librarian to a nobleman residing in 

 Transylvania, after which he entered and, in 1779, 

 graduated at the university of Erlangen. During 

 the following ten years he practised medicine and 

 held several public appointments in Dresden and 

 elsewhere, and then settled in a small village near 

 Leipzig. His observation and practice had so fully 

 convinced him, not only of the uselessness, but also 

 of the injurious character of the prevailing methods 

 of treatment, that he now abandoned all practice 

 and devoted himself to chemical research and the 

 translation into German of foreign scientific books. 

 Of these, Cullen's Materia Medica was one. Feel- 

 ing dissatisfied with his author's explanation of 

 the modus operandi of bark in curing ague, it 

 occurred to him to endeavour to find out what 

 kind of action this drug had on persons in health. 

 He accordingly took considerable doses of bark 

 himself, when he observed that they caused some of 

 the symptoms he had noted as being characteristic 

 of ague in Transylvania. This experiment led 

 to his interpreting the curative power of bark 

 in this fever by the hypothesis that it ' overpowers 

 and suppresses the intermittent fever by exciting 

 a fever of its own of short duration.' This appears 

 in one of his notes in his translation of Cullen. 

 Thus, as Ameke remarks, ' he started with the 

 idea of aiding the recuperative power by a medi- 

 cinal excitant acting directly on the part affected.' 



His experiment also convinced him that it was 

 by ascertaining the effects a drug produced on 

 healthy persons that its mode of action could most 

 surely be ascertained. He therefore commenced 

 a research into the records of medicine, examining 

 the reports of cases of poisoning by individual drugs, 

 and made experiments with other' drugs upon him- 

 self and his friends. He then studied all the cases 

 of cure by these same drugs that he could find. In 

 these investigations he occupied six years. They 

 proved to him that, whatever might be the truth of 

 the theory the bark experiment had suggested, the 

 fact was that in all instances the medicine which 

 had cured produced a very similar condition in 

 healthy persons to that it had relieved. This con- 

 clusion he published in an essay in Hufeland's 

 Journal in 1796, having the title of ' A New Prin- 

 ciple for ascertaining the Curative Properties of 

 Drugs.' It is in this essay that the principle or 

 rule of similia similibus curantur is first put forward 

 by him, not as a theory but as a fact. His views 

 at once met with vehement opposition. His denun- 



ciation of blood-letting and other violent modes oi 

 treatment aroused the animosity of physicians, 

 while the very small doses of medicine which alone 

 were needed according to his new method, pro- 

 voked the apothecaries, whose trade interests were 

 threatened. They refused to dispense his prescrip- 

 tions, and he accordingly gave his medicines to his 

 patients without any charge. For a physician to 

 dispense his own medicine was an infringement 

 of the rights and privileges which German law 

 had conferred upon the apothecaries, and hence he 

 was prosecuted in every town in which he attempted 

 to settle from 1798 until 1810, when he returned 

 to Leipzig. Two years afterwards he was appointed 

 a privat-docent or extra-academical lecturer of 

 the university. The thesis he defended before the 

 Faculty, when a candidate for this position, has 

 been described as ' remarkable for its display of 

 extensive reading in the ancient authors, and not 

 only those more immediately connected with his own 

 professional pursuits, but also in the classical 

 writers of antiquity.' At Leipzig he remained, 

 teaching and developing his system of medicine to 

 an ever-increasing band of enthusiastic disciples, 

 and practising his profession uninfluenced by con- 

 stantly recurring attacks from his professional 

 neighbours until 1821, when a successful prosecu- 

 tion by the apothecaries for dispensing Ms own 

 medicines drove him out of Leipzig. Under the 

 protection of the Duke of Anhalt-Kothen he re- 

 tired to Kothen, where he became a centre of 

 attraction to numerous invalids in all parts of the 

 world. His wife dying in 1831, in 1835 he married 

 a French lady, who induced him to remove to Paris, 

 where he resided and practised until his death, 2d 

 July 1843. 



Hahnemann is also known as one of the earliest 

 advocates of hygiene. His book entitled The Friend 

 of Health, published in 1792, proves him to have 

 been very far in advance of his time on what is 

 now called preventive medicine. Equally so was 

 he in the treatment of the insane. His account 

 of his successful treatment of a certain Hanoverian 

 statesman, who, becoming maniacal, was placed 

 under his care, shows that in 1794 he had adopted 

 those principles of non-restraint and kindness 

 in dealing with the insane which in later years 

 were advocated by Pinel in Paris and Conolly 

 in England. He was also the author of several 

 valuable papers on chemistry in Crell's Annalen 

 der Chimie the first German periodical devoted 

 to that science. A statue of Hahnemann was 

 erected in Leipzig in 1851. See his Life by 

 Albrecht (2d ed. Leip. 1875). 



Hahn-Hahn, IDA, COUNTESS, authoress of a 

 great number of German romances dealing with 

 aristocratic circles of life, conventional in style and 

 often sentimental in feeling, and of numerous books 

 of travel, was born at Tressow, in Mecklenburg- 

 Schwerin, 22d June 1805. At the age of twenty-one 

 she married a relative ; but the union was dissolved 

 three years later. She thereupon travelled much in 

 Europe and the East. In 1850, weary of her restless 

 life, she embraced Roman Catholicism, and in 1852 

 entered a convent at Angers. Her later writings 

 are strongly marked by ultramontane views. The 

 best known of her novels are Grafin Faustine, 

 Ulrich, and Clelia Conti. Her style was cleverly 

 satirised in Fanny Lewald's Diogena (1847). A 

 collection of her early romances in 21 vols. 

 appeared at Berlin in 1851. She died at Mainz, 

 12th January 1880. 



Haidarabacl. See HYDERABAD. 



1 3 a id ilk. or HAJDUK (from a Hungarian word 

 meaning 'drover,' 'cowherd'), the name given in 

 Hungary to those who in the 16th century main- 

 tained a guerilla warfare against the Turks, from 



