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Hahnemann’s first experiments in relation to the action of drugs—says Wheeler, the most recent translator of the “Organon”—were made upon cinchona bark, which at that period was universally admitted to possess remarkable power in relieving and curing “ague,” as the usual form of malarial disease was then termed. “Hahnemann’s experiment”—he goes on to say—“consisted in taking a large dose of cinchona bark while he was in good health and noting its effects upon his healthy body. To his surprise he found reproduced upon himself all the chief phenomena (and even many of the minor symptoms) of a paroxysm of ague. When the attack passed off, a second dose produced a second paroxysm, and Hahnemann was presently face to face with the fact that this drug, which so often cured ague, was capable of reproducing in his own healthy body the phenomena of ague. Like, in fact, cured like.... As soon as the cinchona experiment suggested to Hahnemann the possibility that the principle of like to like (similia similibus) might prove a general law of healing, he began a systematic study of the records of medicine in the search for instances.... Over and over again he found that a drug prescribed empirically had proved itself capable of curing conditions similar to those which it could produce. The records of medicine, in fact, gave plenty of encouragement to his now dawning belief that similia similibus is a genuine Law of Cure.”