26. State Homeopathic Hospital, c. 1895, courtesy of the University of Iowa Photographic Service

In 1877 the University of Iowa Board of Regents established a Department of Homeopathic Medicine in Iowa City, which offered patients an alternative to mainstream methods. The number of homeopaths in Iowa quadrupled in the 1870s, and many of those believed allopathic medicine was being unfairly favored by the state, which supported an allopathic department at the University. (Allopathic medicine is the medical system most commonly used in America today.) A petition signed by 10,000 people convinced the Iowa Legislature that homeopathy deserved equal support. The Department's first hospital space had ten beds in a rented house on Iowa Avenue. By 1896, the homeopaths had moved to a fifty-bed hospital and classroom building two blocks from Old Capitol.

Homeopathy was founded in Germany by Samuel Hahnemann in 1910. The theoretical basis of homeopathic medicine was to treat a disease with a substance which in large doses could produce the symptoms of that disease in a healthy person. For example, a substance which would create a fever should be administered in minute doses to cure a fever, according to the guiding principle, "like is cured by like." Hahnemann's doctrine had a significant following in America, but many allopathic physicians, who believe that diseases are best treated by producing a condition incompatible with the condition to be cured, did not consider homeopathy a legitimate science.

27. Operating room, Dr. George Knott and Martha Fratzke, R. N., c. 1908, courtesy of Frances Knott Engblom

Interest in homeopathy as a separate discipline declined as allopathic medicine incorporated elements of Hahnemann's philosophy. The department's enrollment dropped from seventy-four students in 1896 to ten in 1915. In 1919, the College of Homeopathy was dissolved in favor of a single faculty chair in the College of Medicine. That same year, the Homeopathic Hospital was annexed to the University Hospital. It was destroyed in a 1929 fire. The homeopathic chair was vacated in 1921 but remained on the books through at least 1961.

28. University of Iowa Department of Medicine, Class of 1882, courtesy of the University of Iowa College of Medicine