An Alternative Path : The Making and Remaking of Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital of Philadelphia (review)

This book is a sesquicentennial history of a Philadelphia medical institution that has spent far too much of its existence just struggling for survival. The author divides that struggle into three fifty-year periods. In her first section, she describes the institution’s shaky but “proud” (p. 13) beginnings as a homeopathic medical school, its acquisition of an associated hospital, and its efforts to expand from a local undertaking to one with national status. Dealing with the second period, 1898–1948, she depicts a college attempting to cope with rapid medical change; she highlights, among other things, its embarking on what became a gradual, highly ambivalent, excruciatingly painful, and mostly futile attempt to make itself acceptable to the community of orthodox medical practitioners. In her concluding section, she traces the demeaning final stages of that striving for orthodoxy, while she also describes the efforts of some individuals, confronted by the materialism of late-twentieth-century corporate medicine, to somehow salvage and preserve memories of the college’s homeopathic patrimony.

Rogers has not attempted to treat the nursing school, the schools of radiologic and medical technology, or certain other components of the Hahnemann medical complex in her study. Moreover, despite her title, she deals with the Hahnemann Hospital only incidentally, in its relations with the medical school. In short, the work is “primarily a history of Hahnemann’s medical school: its faculty, administrators, trustees, and students as well as its supporters and detractors” (p. x). She has drawn her study largely from the school’s excellent archival collections. From them she has produced a valuable, interesting, and informative account, one that is alternately descriptive and analytic, of the college’s makeup and life. She has likewise been both highly inclusive and unsparingly honest about what she has found: for instance, an institution that was chronically insecure economically; one whose homeopathic doctrines became progressively more irrelevant; one with often poor physical facilities and low academic standards; one that had its share of scandal, racism, and other problems, not the least of which were those associated with the Flexner report and with committees of the American Medical Association.

The author’s strategy has been to build up the fullest possible impression of the college’s history through an exhaustive mining of reports, yearbooks, news accounts, diaries, correspondence, and other materials both serious and trivial in nature, and by using quotations liberally. This method has lent both texture and authority to the finished work. At the same time, the book shows signs of haste, of too little time having been allowed by the sponsors’ publication deadlines to permit pruning, paraphrasing, or other polishing of the manuscript in the interest of increased readability.

Nevertheless, on balance, Rogers has done much justice to her large topic. She has presented it with directness and lucidity and has shown herself once more to be a perceptive, instructive, and productive historian. She has included a wealth of factual material, including numerous names and identifications of faculty members, trustees, and others associated with the College at one time or another—these data are seemingly minor in themselves, but they will be of interest to Hahnemann alumni, former patients, and others, such as local historians and genealogists. Above all, however, she has placed historians of American medicine in her debt with the unique perspectives that her book provides for the phenomenon of the rise and fall of homeopathy in this country.