of the kind in the country. The New York Homeopathic, the Chicago Hahnemann, and the Philadelphia Hahnemann command material enough. The others lack material, equipment, or care; in some instances—Atlantic Medical, Pulte, Detroit, Kansas City,—they lack everything that a dispensary should possess.
Financially, the two state university departments and the New York Homeopathic school are the only homeopathic schools whose strength is greater than their fee income. All the others are dependent on tuition. Their outlook for higher entrance standards or improved teaching is, therefore, distinctly unpromising. Only a few of them command tuition fees enough to do anything at all: the Chicago Hahnemann, Boston University, and the Philadelphia Hahnemann, with annual fees ranging between $12,000 and $18,000.[1] Nine of them are hopelessly poor: the San Francisco Hahnemann, Hering (Chicago), the Detroit Homeopathic, and the Atlantic Medical operate on less than $4000[1] a year; the Southwestern (Louisville) and Pulte (Cincinnati) on less than $1500.[1]
In the year 1900 there were twenty-two homeopathic colleges in the United States; to-day there are fifteen; the total student enrolment has within the same period been cut almost in half, decreasing from 1909 to 1009;[2] the graduating classes have fallen from 413 to 246. As the country is still poorly supplied with homeopathic physicians, these figures are ominous; for the rise of legal standard must inevitably affect homeopathic practitioners. In the financial weakness of their schools, the further shrinkage of the student body will inhibit first the expansion, then the keeping up, of the sect.
Logically, no other outcome is possible. The ebbing vitality of homeopathic schools is a striking demonstration of the incompatibility of science and dogma. One may begin with science and work through the entire medical curriculum consistently, exposing everything to the same sort of test; or one may begin with a dogmatic assertion and resolutely refuse to entertain anything at variance with it. But one cannot do both. One cannot simultaneously assert science and dogma; one cannot travel half the road under the former banner, in the hope of taking up the latter, too, at the middle of the march. Science, once embraced, will conquer the whole. Homeopathy has two options: one to withdraw into the isolation in which alone any peculiar tenet can maintain itself; the other to put that tenet into the melting-pot. Historically it undoubtedly played an important part in discrediting empirical allopathy. But laboratories of physiology and pharmacology are now doing that work far more effectively than homeopathy; and they are at the same time performing a constructive task for which homeopathy, as such, is unfitted. It will be clear, then, why, when outlining a system of schools for the training of physicians on scientific lines, no specific provision is made for homeopathy. For everything of proved value in
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Estimated.
- ↑ Journal of the American Institute of Homeopathy, vol. i., 1909, no. 11, p. 537. The Journal of the American Medical Association, Aug. 14, 1909 (pp. 556, 557), gives figures somewhat lower: 889 instead of 1009; 209 instead of 246. The discrepancy does not alter our interpretation.
