[By Tieck, 1809. In plaster. Modelled at Munich, and now in the Royal Museum, Berlin.]
345. Albrecht Thaer. Physician and Agriculturist.
[Born at Celle, in Hanover, 1752. Died at Mœglin, near Frankfort, 1828. Aged 76.]
Educated for the medical profession at Göttingen, where in 1774, he took his doctor’s degree. From his youth upwards of a serious and reflective turn, engaged in philosophical studies, and in brooding over plans for the amelioration of his kind. He passed some time in England, at the University of Oxford, and there attracted the notice of George III., to whom he was appointed Physician in Ordinary. After making a pedestrian tour through England, he visited Scotland, and closely investigated the system of agriculture there pursued. Henceforth he belonged to agricultural science. In 1794, he published his introduction to English agriculture. Retiring to Celle upon the death of his father, he founded in his native place an institution for the education of young agriculturists. Implements instantly improved, and a rational system of cultivation spread throughout the Communes bordering on that of Celle. Invited to Berlin, he quitted Hanover in 1804. Obtaining a property at Mœglin on the Oder, through the generosity of the King of Prussia, he began a course of oral instruction in agriculture to classes of youth collected from all parts of Germany. His Institution rapidly rose to the rank of an Academy, and all its Professors were paid by the Prussian government. As an agricultural writer, the name of Thaer is worthy of being placed beside that of our own Arthur Young, and of the meritorious Frenchman, Olivier de Serres. He is the reformer of husbandry in his own country, and an enlightened expounder of the great principles upon which agricultural prosperity in modern times rests.
[By Carl Wichmann. Marble. In the possession of Thaer’s family at Mœglin.]
346. Samuel Hahnemann. Physician and Founder of Homœopathy.
[Born at Meissen, in Saxony, 1755. Died in Paris, 1843. Aged 88.]
He began life under good auspices. His father, a porcelain painter, an upright and instructed man, in straitened circumstances, is said to have been assiduous in inculcating upon him his own principles of integrity. When, unable to support further the expenses of his education, he was about putting him to a trade, the Meissen professors, struck by the lad’s talents, resolved to continue his education gratuitously, and afterwards obtained for him the same favour at Leipzig. He embarked in his profession, and gained such distinction, that for a whole twelvemonth, during the illness of the celebrated Wagner, all the hospitals of Dresden were placed under his direction. His eminence offered the fairest prospects, when he was visited by a growing distrust of the science which he practised. He found in it no settled and commanding principles. He saw the ablest men, groping their way between experience and conjecture. One law, as he thought, dawned on him; that the cure of the disease is to be effected by the same agent which, in the healthy body, would have produced it. On this basis he re-constructed medicine, giving to his new system the name of “Homœopathy,” or “The Science of Like Affections.” His disciples devoted themselves to the creation of a suitable Materia Medica, by experimenting upon their own healthy bodies; and it is a second discovery of Hahnemann, if a discovery, that infinitesimal doses may be effectual in the cure of disease. The system of Hahnemann waged war to the knife, and it met with war to the knife. As an historical point it is worthy of remark, that Homœopathy has spread, and is spreading, its conquests. The honesty of the founder may stand on the single plain fact, that by denouncing and renouncing established doctrines, he stepped down from the safe height of his profession, into hazard of the poverty which he had tasted, and from which he had laboriously risen.
[By Rauch. The original bust is in marble, in the Library at Bremen.]
346A. Samuel Hahnemann. Physician and Founder of Homœopathy.