Richard Hughes

Richard Hughes was born in London, England. He received the title of M.R.C.S. (Eng.), in 1857 and L.R.C.P. (Edin.) in 1860. The title of M.D. was conferred upon him by the American College a few years later. He worked with Timothy Field Allen on his book Cyclopedia of Drug Pathogenesy, and also helped Robert Ellis Dudgeon translate Samuel Hahnemann’s The Materia Medica Pura into English.

Hughes converted to homeopathy, and in 1876 he was appointed the Permanent Secretary of the Organization of the International Congress of Homoeopathy Physicians in Philadelphia. He also presided over the International Homeopathic Congress in London, organizing the Congresses that were held every five years. He edited the Annals of the British Homeopathic Society. He worked at the London Homeopathic Hospital for a while, but spent most of his medical career in practice in Brighton. In 1889 he was appointed an Editor of the British Journal of Homeopathy, a position he held until his death. In 1902, he was appointed Lecturer in Materia Medica by the British Homeopathic Society.

The prevailing British homeopathy of the time was critical and scholarly approach, compared to the mysticism that the field had relied on in the past. Hughes undertook to both increase the scientific basis for homeopathy and to purify the homeopathic materia medica, which resulted in his Cyclopedia of Drug Pathogenesy, co-written with Jabez P. Drake.