On February 18, 1877, Carroll Dunham, MD, the 29th President of the American Institute of Homeopathy, died. He was then forty-eight years old, barely two months into the presidential term he would never finish. Six years earlier, in 1870, he had delivered what remains the most debated address in our organization’s history ”Freedom of Medical Opinion and Action: A Vital Necessity and a Great Responsibility”—a call for open doors and the free exchange of ideas within the AIH. He died before he could see what followed. By 1874, knowledge of homeopathy had been quietly removed as a requirement for membership in the organization he loved. The doors had opened. The foundation had cracked. That we are still here 150 years later is a testimony to how strong that foundation was to begin with.
It is worth pausing to reflect on who Carroll Dunham actually was and why he wrote what he wrote. He was not a latitudinarian. He was not arguing for the inclusion of practitioners who had abandoned the law of similars. He was, by every account, a strict Hahnemannian,a physician who prescribed a single homeopathic medicine, who trusted the provings, who took the case with meticulous care. He states this plainly in the address itself: “I fully believe not only that the practical rules laid down by Hahnemann, and which enjoin the single remedy and the minimum dose, are the rules of sound practice.” To understand what he was arguing, you must understand what he was arguing against. The American Medical Association, formed two years after the AIH in 1847, had embedded in its Code of Ethics an explicit prohibition against any consultation with homeopathic physicians. In New Jersey, a physician could be fined fifty dollars for every homeopathic prescription he wrote. Dunham was not arguing for openness in a vacuum. He was arguing for freedom of thought and practice in direct response to an organized campaign of institutional persecution. His position was that the AIH should be an open forum, not because standards did not matter but because he believed that truth proclaimed freely and consistently would do what exclusion never could. “Nor do I know of any effective way to combat error,” he wrote, “save by proclaiming truth.” He was right about the principle. What he did not anticipate was that opening the forum without first defining the truth to be proclaimed would leave that forum without a floor to stand on.
I have thought about Carroll Dunham more than perhaps any other person in our organization’s history. I came to the AIH as its first naturopathic physician president carrying a deep and abiding love for this medicine and for the history behind it, a history I have spent years studying, reading the old medical journals including the Transactions of the American Institute of Homœopathy, the Homeopathic Recorder, the Homeopathic Physician, The Medical Advance, the IHA Transactions, and many other journals that represent the voices of the physicians who built this profession from the ground up. That love is what brought me to this chair. And it is that same love that made it impossible for me to look at where the AIH stood and do nothing different. Growth had stagnated. Vitality had waned. Interest was fading. New voices were not finding their way in. An organization that had led homeopathic medicine in this country since 1844 was at risk of becoming a footnote rather than a force. I arrived knowing that the moves I intended to make—expanding membership, broadening the welcome, building bridges across a profession that has been fractured for a long time—would remind some of what happened after 1870. I will not pretend that does not weigh on me. The weight of it has been, at times, terrifying. I have sat with that weight. I have read everything I could find on this topic, most of it direct articles and transactions written in the 1870s, in the voices of the physicians who lived it. I have traced what happened year by year after Dunham’s address. I understand, as clearly as I can, why the foundation cracked. And I believe, not from optimism but from careful study, that we now have what Dunham did not—the tools to hold both the door open and the standard at the same time.
The first tool is definition. In 1874, the AIH removed knowledge of homeopathy as a membership requirement because the organization had no agreed-upon definition of what homeopathy actually was. That absence of definition is what allowed the doors to open without a floor to stand on. This spring the AIH published the first consensus definition of homeopathy in the United States, a definition grounded in three principles that are not negotiable: the Law of Similars, single homeopathic medicine prescribing, and optimal posology.1 These principles are not new. Hahnemann articulated them. Dunham practiced them. Every physician who has achieved the kind of clinical results that made this medicine worth fighting for has stood on this same foundation. What is new is that we have put them in writing, with the signatures of organizations across the profession behind them. Error cannot survive the clear and consistent proclamation of truth.
The second tool is governance. Dunham had no mechanism to protect the highest levels of leadership from the erosion he never anticipated. We do. The AIH is working to enshrine in its bylaws that no less than two-thirds of the Board of Trustees must hold the Diplomate of the American Board of Homeopathic Medicine—the DABHM—the highest clinical credential a licensed homeopathic physician can hold in the United States. This has not been easy to advance. When I brought this bylaw change forward in the fall of 2025, the board voted it down. The concern was legitimate—that there are not yet enough active Diplomates to sustain such a requirement, and that the organization could be weakened in the short term by holding too tightly to a standard not enough members currently meet. While I heard that concern, I will not stop pushing. Because the answer to “we do not have enough Diplomates” is not to lower the standard; it is to build the pipeline. This requirement is not punitive. It is aspirational. It is what keeps the open door from becoming an open field. Dunham understood that freedom without responsibility is not freedom at all. This requirement is how we will honor that truth.
Which brings me to the doors themselves. The AIH has expanded its membership categories significantly. Licensed prescribing physicians remain at the center—voting members, board eligible, the governing heart of this organization as they have been since 1844. But the full ecosystem of homeopathic care now has a place here: allied healthcare providers, international practitioners, practitioners in formal training, students, and supporters of the mission. This is not a dilution. It is a completion. The AIH was founded in 1844 as a physicians-only organization not because the founders believed no one else mattered, but because in 1844 the broader healthcare ecosystem we know today did not yet exist. Nurses, pharmacists, allied health providers, none of these professions existed in their modern form. The organization was structured for the world it was born into. That world has changed. The mission has not. From our first session in 1844, the charge has been to promote the science and art of homeopathic medicine, protect the integrity of the profession and its medicines, set the standard for education and practice, and ensure the public always has access to practitioners they can trust. That charge does not belong to physicians alone. It belongs to everyone who has committed themselves to this medicine. What has changed is our capacity to build the full professional community that mission has always required.
The expanded membership structure of the American Institute of Homeopathy is as follows:
Full membership details, benefits, and application information are available at homeopathyusa.org/membership-benefits
I want to speak for a moment to the physicians who have been in this medicine for a long time. You did not choose this path because it was easy. You chose it because you saw something in homeopathy that you could not unsee—a patient who got better when nothing else had worked, a case that followed the Law of Similars so precisely that coincidence was not a reasonable explanation, or a clinical result that changed the way you understood what medicine could do. That conviction has come at a cost to all of us. Explaining ourselves to skeptical colleagues, building a practice outside the infrastructure that conventional medicine provides, holding the standard in an environment that has not always rewarded us for doing so. The AIH exists because of physicians like you. It has survived 182 years because of physicians like you. And from whatever changes we make to who stands alongside you, the center of this organization is yours.
This is a moment in the history of this organization. The doors are wider than they have ever been. The definition is clearer than it has ever been. The standard is being protected at the highest level it has ever been protected. Carroll Dunham asked for an Institute that would be “an open forum, in which truth shall be so distinctly proclaimed and so persuasively enforced that error shall have no chance.” That is what we are building. What happens next depends on who shows up. If you are a member, stay and bring someone with you. If you have been on the outside of this organization, the door is open. If you know a colleague who walked away from the AIH, reach out to them. Tell them it has changed. The profession is stronger when we are in it together, and this medicine deserves the strongest possible organization behind it.
Carroll Dunham died with his work unfinished. He had named the problem—that freedom and standards must coexist—but the tools to hold them together had not yet been built. He also faced significant opposition in his own time. Those who heard his 1870 address were not all persuaded, and history shows the consequences of what was left unresolved. Carroll Dunham died on February 18, 1877. One hundred-and-forty-eight years later, on that same date, Dr. Nicholas Nossaman, MD, DABHM, the 127th President of this organization, died. He was my physician, my mentor, and my friend. He was one of those prescribers who never wavered —a single homeopathic medicine, carefully chosen, in optimal posology – and his patients got better. When he died, his family gave me his desk. It is the same desk I sat at as a child in his office, the desk I now sit at to see patients of my own, and the desk from which I write these words. Two weeks before he died, in what would be our last conversation, I shared with him the very fears I described at the opening of this address, that I was making too many changes, that I was overreaching, that perhaps the weight of this history was more than I could carry. He told me to be strong, to be brave, and to trust that the work I was doing mattered. I wept. It was less a conversation than a benediction. I carry that charge with me alongside the example of the 29th president who named the problem that Nick spent his career solving. I do not know if I will get every decision right. What I know is that I have dedicated my life to this profession and I will continue to give it everything I have. This medicine deserves an organization equal to its history. We are building it.
1 The AIH Consensus Definition of Homeopathy is published in full as Appendix A to this address.
In service to the art,
Lisa Amerine, ND, DABHM
138th President, AIH. 2024 -Present
1 Appendix A
Homeopathy1 is a system of medicine based on the reproducible observation that disease may be treated by a substance that produces similar effects in healthy individuals.2 This observation, known as the Law of Similars3 (Similia Similibus Curantur), was developed into a therapeutic system by Samuel Hahnemann.4
Hahnemannian homeopathy is practiced in strict accordance with the method described by Hahnemann in the Organon of Medicine, Materia Medica Pura, Chronic Diseases, and Lesser Writings. True homeopathic practice adheres to the following fundamental principles:
Homeopathy proper differs from modern techniques that incorrectly call themselves homeopathic, yet prescribe: Mixtures of more than one medication at a time.
On behalf of our organization, we affirm that we understand and adopt this definition as our official standard for homeopathy.
We commit to:
We acknowledge that Hahnemannian homeopathic practice requires adherence to the Law of Similars, single remedy prescribing, optimal posology, individualized treatment based on the totality of characteristic symptoms, and the use of medicines proven through systematic trials on healthy individuals.
Footnotes
Dimitriadis, G. Homœopathic Diagnosis: Hahnemann through Bönninghausen. Hahnemann Institute, Sydney, Australia, 2004.
Hahnemann, S. Organon of Medicine. 6th ed. Translated by Künzli, J., Naudé, A., and Pendleton, P. Cooper Publishing, Blaine, WA, 1982.
Hahnemann, S. Materia Medica Pura. Translated by Dudgeon, R.E. B. Jain Publishers, New Delhi, 1990.
Hahnemann, S. The Medicine of Experience (1805). In: Lesser Writings. Translated by Dudgeon, R.E. B. Jain Publishers, New Delhi.
Oskin, J. Homeopathy: Definition and Fundamental Principles.
Saine, A. (Ed.). Lessons in Pure Homeopathy, From the Writings of Hahnemann’s Best Student and Medicine’s Most Successful Practitioner, Adolph Lippe, MD (Volumes I & II). Dare to Know Press of the Canadian Academy of Homeopathy, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 2024.
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