To explain the purported therapeutic powers of homeopathic remedies (only for ultra high dilutes) Jacques Benveniste created the postulate of "water memory".
Early studies of how living systems react to stimuli showed that physiological responses could be obtained with some regularity upon exposure to defined doses.
Devising a mechanism for these observations proved difficult, and a significant amount of scientific effort was expended on the subject.
[2][3] The work of Arndt and Schultz, along with that of Ernst Heinrich Weber and Gustav Theodor Fechner, was called upon to provide some explanation for the observed relationships between dose and response during the early days of pharmacology.
However, the concepts Hormesis and Receptor Theory eventually supplanted such "laws" as a more complete and well-defined means of describing how chemicals and physiological systems interact.