Samuel Brooking and Homeopathy

Samuel Brooking, a Medical Officer and Surgeon from the East India Company, was an orthodox physician who converted to homeopathy after his own cure from jungle fever, and who then retired from the East India Company in order to study homeopathy more fully.

He established a Homeopathic Hospital at Tanjore, in South India, in 1847. Brooking reported that after suffering the initial skepticism, he was now Durbah Surgeon to the Rajah of Tanjore and the Rajah of Poodoocoota, and that he had been running a homeopathic hospital in Tanjore since 1846 with many hundreds of patients, which ‘is acceptable to all classes, particularly the Brahmins’.

In 1848, Samuel Brooking wrote to Epps Chemists in London for a chest of homeopathic remedies, and Samuel Brooking also established another homeopathic Hospital in Poodoocoota, forty miles away, which he managed to attend three days a week using a relay of horses. Samuel Brooking also taught homeopathy to ‘several intelligent young medical men’.