Pundit Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar

Homeopathy as a system of medicine is only about two hundred years old. Of these two hundred years, the Banerji family has been associated with it for over hundred and fifty years.

Homeopathy was a phenomenon started in Germany by Samuel Christian Friedrich Hahnemann. It came to India in 1810 with the German missionaries who treated the poor charitably and converted many to Christianity. About mid- 1800, Bengal had a “Renaissance d'art”, literature and culture and great intellectuals like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya, Abanindranath Tagore and Swami Vivekananda. They helped transform the Indian civilization to great heights and awaken the Indian Freedom movement with their writings, speech and debates. These intellectuals were also the beneficiaries of the early homeopathic medicinal treatments brought to India.

Pundit Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar (1820-1891) - Pundit Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Sanskrit scholar, educator, reformer, writer and philanthropist from Bengal, was considered to be one of the greatest intellectuals and activists of the nineteenth century. He was born in the Banerji family at the village of Birsingha in Midnapore district of Bengal.

Vidyasagar suffered from intense migraine headaches and was treated in Kolkata by homeopathic medicines prescribed by Babu Rajen Dutta, an aristocrat who studied homeopathy from the Germans and the French, following Hahnemann’s ideology. Vidyasagar was so impressed by the results that he persuaded his brother, Ishan Chandra, to take an interest in this treatment form, and take up the learning of homeopathy and treat the very poor of their village as a charitable enterprise. He believed that in the field of social reform, the poor and downtrodden needed medical aid for cure of their illnesses and at a cheaper cost. He was convinced that homeopathy was the answer.

Ishan Chandra (unknown -1903) - ISHAN CHANDRA, youngest brother of Pundit Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar took interest in the learning of homeopathy and supported his elder brother to spread this mode of treatment. His interest in homeopathy spurred him to study the science. Thereafter he started a charitable practice for the socially less-than-privileged and practiced it till his death in 1903.