Constantine Hering was born on January 1st, 1800 in Oschatz, Saxony, and today is the anniversary of his death, July 23, in 1880.
He was a boy with a great interest in learning, and went to medicine, studying at the University of Leipzig. Like many, Hering was a skeptic of this new field of medicine, homoeopathy, and he decided to repeat Hahnemann’s original proving with Cinchona in order to discredit him. Shortly after that he received a wound on his finger, and the doctors suggested amputating it, but a friend gave him Arsenicum Album – and the finger healed. Hering was now a convert to homeopathy, and in 1824 started corresponding with Hahnemann.
Here is what Hering said about homeopathy: “I became a fanatic. I went about the country, visited inns, where I got up on tablets and benches to harangue whoever might be present to listen to my enthusiastic speeches on homeopathy.”
In 1826 Hering completed his medical degree with the University of Wurzburg, and then the King of Saxony commissioned him to work as a botanist on a trip to Surinam in the north of South America. Here he became interested in snakes and using the venom as remedies.
He was brought a bushmaster snake that had been run over, but was still alive. As any homeopath would do, he milked the venom, and then triturated that with lactose – making Lachesis, and proved this remedy on himself.
In 1829, in Surinam, he married Charlotte Van Kemper, and they had a child together, John. In Surinam, he met George Bute, a missionary, and treated him for a fever. Bute then learnt Homeopathy from Hering, and when he returned to Pennsylvania he persuaded Hering to also move there – and Hering arrived in 1833. Hering’s son John stayed with his in-laws in Surinam, although he did come to the US for periods for school.
In 1834 he married Marianne Husmann, and together they had four children, although only Max and Odelia lived past infancy.
In 1835 Hering became the founding president for the world’s first school of homeopathy – The North American Academy of the Homeopathic Healing Art, or more often called the Allentown Academy. Teaching was in German, as all the published works were in German, so you needed to learn German first – and this may have contributed to the school’s decline, it closed in 1842.
In 1844 the American Institute of Homeopathy was formed, and Hering was a founding member. However in 1845 Hering decided to return to Germany – his second wife had died in 1840 and he intended to take over Hahnemann’s practice. While in Germany he met and married his third wife, Therese Bucheim. Hering and Therese had eight children, and of these, six, Rudolph, Melitta, Walter, Hildegard, Carl and Hermann, outlived Hering.
It is in 1845, also, that Hering wrote the foreword for Hahnemann’s Chronic Diseases, and it is from this that Hering’s name has become known by every homeopathic student the world over: for Hering’s Law of Cure. What he had to say was this: “Every homœopathic physician must have observed that the improvement in pain takes place from above downward ; and in diseases, from within outward.” He did also write that “All diseases diminish in intensity, improve, and are cured by the internal organism freeing itself from them little by little ; the internal disease approaches more and more to the external tissues, until it finally arrives at the skin.” So, for Hering, to show that a chronic disease has been cured, there must be some form of skin eruption.
Despite his intention to stay in Germany, the American Homeopathic world was a mess, and Hering returned to the states to support homeopathy in the US. In 1848 that Hering opened a new school – the Homeopathic Medical College of Pennsylvania – and formal education in Homeopathy was once again available in the US.
In his lifetime, Hering proved 104 remedies on himself, and wrote many text books that are still used as references today. Of note, The Guiding Symptoms, which was released as 10 volumes over several years, was a repertory written with Dr Charles G Raue, Dr Calvin B Knerr and Dr Charles Mohr. He also had several Materia Medica texts, and was editor of a number of Homeopathic journals.
Dr Hering passed away on July 23rd, 1880 at the age of 80. He saw his last patient at 6pm, had dinner with his family, continued work on his 4th volume of Guiding Symptoms, but then started having difficulty breathing. He passed away before the doctor could arrive.
There is much more that could be written about Dr Constantine Hering, he had such a great influence on homeopathy at the time, and that effect has lasted well over 100 years into the future.
My main source for this piece has been The Face of Homoeopathy: an illustrated history of the first 200 years by Julian Winston, first published in 1999 and reprinted in 2020.
If you would like to read the foreword in it’s entirety for the origin of Hering’s Law of Cure, you can do so here.