New York City: Flowers-Fifth Ave Homeopathic Hospital

It is October in New York and the colours are vibrant. Yellows and Reds and Greens, the sun is bright and the air is fresh. Central park is an oasis in the middle of this loud and bustling city. I am on the east side of Central Park where there are 14 ft wrought iron massive gates which lead to the Botanical Gardens. Across the road is the previous location of the Flower-Fifth Avenue Homeopathic Hospital at the corner of 106 Ave and 5th Ave.

This was the home of the New York and clinical affiliate of the New York Homeopathic Medical College from 1936 to 1972. But it's not the original Flower Hospital — that was located on York Avenue and 63rd Street and was torn down in the 1940s and replaced by apartment buildings.

Before merging with Flower, Fifth Avenue Hospital was the successor of the old Hahnemann Hospital (the first homeopathic hospital in NYC), which had been on Park Avenue and 68th Street until 1922.

Flower Fifth is now the Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center, and. I was able to visit and enter when I was there. It is a beautiful Beaux-Arts building, with marble walls and chandeliers, currently covered in scaffolding.

Two buildings down is the New York Academy of Medicine (nyac.com) at 1216 5th. Arlene Shaner is the Historical Collections Librarian and the person who met me in the rare books room. This was the 16th and 17th century book room, the other centuries were elsewhere.

Arlene is a native New Yorker, guiding me in how handle rare books very carefully. Many diagonally cut foam blocks are used to keep the books protected from the spine cracking. She was proud to tell me that some of the artifacts that they had included George Washingtons lower dentures, (carved from whale bone and the teeth from an unknown source). She also shared with me books from Galileo from the rare collections and a piece of artwork from Lister.

Arlene has ready for me early copies of the Organon dated 1836, a 1916 book of Hospitals and sanatoriums of the Homeopathic School of Medicine with an Impressive photo collection of Homeopathic Hospitals, Women’s and Children’s centres throughout the US. A copy of Hahnemanns ‘chronic diseases’ dated 1845 stamped “Property of the New York Hospital”.

Homeopathy in New York at the time was dominant and powerful. New York Homeopathic Medical College was very progressive and competitive with a high profile, graduating the first female doctor in Canada Emily Stow who maintained a practice in Toronto in 1867. She helped create the Toronto Women’s Literary Club (TWLC) in 1876, which started out to promote intellectual development and higher education for women. In 1883, the TWLC became known as the Canadian Women’s Suffrage Association and Emily Stowe was the vice-president. Emily Stowe Founded The Women's College Hospital inToronto. In 2018, Stowe was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame.

In my research into this trip, I was wanting to look at hand written case notes, or hand written manuscripts. In my learning I was directed to contact Nicholas Webb, the college archivist at the the New York Medical college https://www.nymc.edu/ which is the successor of the New York Homeopathic Medical College.

Regarding my request for homeopathic case notes, handwritten anything, Nicholas tells me: “the College Archives does have a fair amount of material related to homeopathy, but we don't have any handwritten manuscripts of this type that I'm aware of. We have the 19th century meeting minutes of the Homeopathic Medical Society of the County of New York, and a few handwritten items by 19th century students, but we don't have any significant handwritten casebooks, provings or similar texts by major homeopathic physicians. We do have a collection of 19th century homeopathic printed matter in our rare books room.” NYMC is located in the northern suburbs of NYC in Westchester County in Valhalla.

Some of the big homeopaths of the time were James Tyler Kent and also Constantine Hering. Kent and Hering's manuscripts are located in Philadelphia since that's where they were based. The Drexel Archives would be where information about homeopathy in Philadelphia would be found https://drexel.edu/legacy-center/