George Vithoulkas

George Vithoulkas was born in Athens in July 1932 and came to homeopathy by an unlikely route — trained as a civil engineer, he encountered the subject while working in South Africa and went on to study it formally in India, qualifying in 1966. He returned to Greece and spent the following decades doing something almost no one else was doing at the time: teaching classical homeopathy as a rigorous, systematic discipline, with live case-taking in front of students, in the manner of a teaching hospital.

He is the founder of the International Academy of Classical Homeopathy (IACH), established in 1995 on the small Sporadic island of Alonissos, where practitioners from around the world travel for on-site seminars. Since 2010 the Academy has also run a two-year e-learning programme now delivered in eleven languages. His writings — The Science of Homeopathy, A New Model for Health and Disease, the Essence of Materia Medica, and the ongoing multi-volume Materia Medica Viva — have been translated into 36 languages and remain standard reference works in homeopathy training worldwide.

His teaching centres on what he calls the "Levels of Health" model: a framework in which he proposes that a person's vitality can be graded, and that the practitioner's task is to read the direction a case is moving in rather than chase individual complaints. In 1996 he received the Right Livelihood Award (often called the "Alternative Nobel Prize") for, in the jury's words, his contribution to the revival of homeopathic knowledge and to training homeopaths to high standards. He holds honorary professorships at several universities in Eastern Europe and continues to direct the Academy and lecture at 94.