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Between the years 1850 and 1860, homoeopathy assumed a good deal of prominence in the city of New York. Many of the leading families during this period turned their backs on the regular practitioners,—the “Allopaths,” as they were then frequently called,—and confided themselves and their maladies to the care of members of the new school. This naturally led to much bitterness of feeling between the two groups of physicians, just as had happened at an earlier date in the larger towns of England and Scotland; and this condition of things lasted for at least twenty years. Hostile action on the part of the county and state medical societies proved of very little use in diminishing the popularity of the new method of treating diseases; and so it was finally decided to withdraw all further opposition to the new sect and to see what an attitude of indifference and the stopping of all persecution would accomplish. Thanks largely to this wise and sensible policy, homoeopathy gradually lost its short-lived ascendancy, and the more sensible members of the community returned to their former allegiance. What I have said in regard to the rise and fall of homoeopathy in New York is, I am confident, true in a general way of its fate in most of the other large cities of the United States, but I am personally familiar only with the conditions that prevailed in my native city.

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