ABSTRACT
The Passing of KnowledgeFor more than a century, America homeopaths benefited from professional options available to few other sectarians or their European counterparts. In effect, they could obtain their degrees from a regular medical school and supplement their education with a homeopathic apprenticeship or postgraduate instruction on homeopathic principles and therapeutics. Those who took their education at a regular school before turning to homeopathy, however, were sometimes faced with revocation of their diplomas. This hostile act proved to be an exception rather than the rule, because regular medical schools and their faculty tended to turn a blind eye to the practice. Over time, however, the practice of obtaining a regular medical education first and then taking postgraduate work in homeopathy worried homeopathic educators, who feared the loss of potential New School doctors to regular medicine. Too much importance was attached to the mere possession of a diploma, wrote homeopath L. M’Farland in 1854 (p. 145), “as if the exhibition of that was sufficient to settle the question of professional competency.”1
