Book Review

In 1848, three Pennsylvania physicians, all trained in some of the most respected regular medical schools in America or Europe, opened the Homeopathic Medical College of Pennsylvania. From the very beginning of its existence, this school (later known as Hahnemann Medical College) was intended to institutionalize the teaching of a therapeutic regimen that was a decided alternative to "regular medicine." Backed by a strong community of dedicated practitioners, this medical school would provide the "alternative path" for the training and the practice of homeopathic medicine throughout the nineteenth century. By the twentieth century, however, the paradigm of laboratory medicine, with its emphasis on material causes, would override the multiplicity of therapeutic approaches of nineteenth-century medical practice, including the holistic and purely symptom-based practice of homeopathy. But, as Naomi Rogers points out, while many medical colleges closed in thelate nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Hahnemann Medical College continued to educate students because the community support for this institution embraced a flexible meaning of the "alternative path" first proposed in 1848.

. . .