Scottish physician

Among his literary labors was the translation of foreign medical works
into German, and it was through that activity that Hahnemann arrived at his
interpretation of nature’s way of healing. During his first year of work as a
translator, in 1790, he encountered a passage in a text authored by a celebrated
Scottish physician that addressed the action of the drug cinchona. The dried
bark of a South American tree of the madder family, cinchona contains quinine
and had been used in Europe since the mid-1600s to treat malaria and other
fevers. As one of the handful of drugs with unquestioned therapeutic value,
cinchona was a substance of more than ordinary interest to doctors, and Hahnemann