Clemens Maria Franz (Friedrich) Freiherr (Baron) von Bönninghausen (Herinckhave near Fleringen, 12 March 1785 – Münster, 26 January 1864) was a lawyer, Dutch and Prussian civil servant, agriculturalist, botanist, physician and pioneer in the field of homeopathy.

Von Bönninghausen was born on the estate Herinckhave near Fleringen in the province of Overijssel in the Netherlands as descendant of an old titled family.

His father was Lodewijk Ernst von Bönninghausen, representative of the people from Overijssel, officer and chamberlain of the Prince-Bishop from Köln.

Von Bönninghausen held various positions, including auditor and privy council of the King, general secretary of the taxes, Royal Librarian, treasurer of the pensions and head of the Topographical Institutes.

When his father died in 1812 von Bönninghausen moved to his family estate in Darup, just across the border in Kreis Coesfeld, Prussia.

In 1816, at the reorganization of the provinces Rhineland and Westphalia, he was appointed as president of the Court of Justice and General Commissaries of the land register of North Rhine-Westphalia.

One of them, friend and fellow botanist Carl Ernst August Weihe, urged him to use the herb Pulsatilla, believed to be the cure of his ailment.

He became a close associate and confidant of his teacher Samuel Hahnemann, founder of the homeopathy, who admired Bönninghausen's ability to systematize the expanding homeopathic knowledge of materia medica.

He proposed that disparate symptoms associated with a remedy could be grouped as a single overarching tendency, hence the importance of generalities and modalities in his system of case analysis.

An early advocate of high potencies, he conducted a successful prospective trial of 200C in domestic animals and livestock, reasoning that veterinary homeopathy was harder to dismiss as a placebo effect.

[7] A memorial to von Bönninghausen was installed in 2005 at the University of Münster, on the celebration of the 250th birthday of Samuel Hahnemann's birth.