AT the age of 80, homeopathic doctor Marianne Harling admits she is thinking about retirement - if she can find someone to take her place at the Wessex Healthy Living Foundation in Bournemouth.

But it's hard to imagine anyone stepping into the shoes of Dr Harling, who qualified as a medical practitioner at Oxford during World War Two when opportunities for women were limited.

"When I went up to Oxford, there was a quota of 60 men to seven women. As the war had just started, they couldn't fill the men's quota. I think we were a pretty good lot," she said.

Straight after completing her training, she married and had four children. "I thought of going into general practice, but I thought I would have to learn all over again. I left Oxford perfectly confident to deal with a brain tumour, but helpless in front of a headache."

After the war, many more drugs became available, transforming the treatment of disease, but Dr Harling admits her family had always been more inclined towards nature cures.

"My father was a classical scholar and my mother never worked for pay. She was always advising neighbours on how not to get ill. She was unconventional and was propagating the Hay Diet (which advocates not mixing food groups at meals) in 1936."

Dr Harling spent four years working as a public health doctor in London before she decided to train as a homeopath. She set up in private practice in 1958 and also did some locum work for GPs who were going on holiday.

"I found it a very satisfying way of going on. There weren't any homeopathic doctors in Bournemouth at the time. I used to say my practice extended from Portsmouth to Torquay."

She added that homeopathy had been around in its current form for about 200 years, but had first been debated by Hippocrates, the Greek father of modern medicine.

"Homeopathic is treating like with like. It made sense to me that if nature was pushing in one direction, you should help. It also used very tiny doses, which appealed to me, as you wouldn't get any dangerous side effects. You can't harm people with homeopathy," explained Dr Harling.

"When I was a medical student, I was working next door to the team that was working on penicillin, which had an enormous effect. I'm not complaining about any drugs, except there are too many of them.

"Nowadays there are these nasty hospital infections . What happens is that the bugs mutate and antibiotics won't help them any more."

Dr Hrling believes in harnessing the body's own healing powers, and in people looking after their bodies through a healthy diet, not smoking, nor drinking too much alcohol.

"Homeopathy involves asking so many questions and finding out so much. I was always nosy. Each patient was like a novel, but much more interesting. Time and again if you take a person's life story, you will find an accident or a disappointment preceded their illness."

Despite a recent television programme that cast doubts on the efficacy of homeopathy as bunk, Dr Harling is convinced it works and is more than a placebo, pointing out that it is used successfully on animals.

Now suffering from Parkinson's Disease, she takes conventional drugs for her condition, but also uses homeopathic medicine. "If I bump myself, I use arnica and I use rescue remedy. I never take painkillers or sleeping pills. I get vertigo occasionally, but I can usually deal with that homeopathically," she said.

"I think if homeopathic pills and some of these physical treatments such as reiki and reflexology were used in the first instance, many people would probably never need to go on to heavier drugs."

In 1978, Dr Harling was one of the founders of the Wessex Healthy Living Foundation in Southbourne. It was formed by a group of complementary therapists with the financial backing of Bee Klug, who herself recovered from a serious illness with the help of naturopathy and homeopathy.

The foundation is run as a charity and people who are on benefits can obtain treatment at a reduced price if practitioners feel they could benefit.