BURKE A. HINSDALE stated that homeopathy was first recorded in University history in 1851 (Hinsdale, p. 106). However, as early as 1848 the practioners and patrons of homeopathy in Michigan were petitioning the legislature and the University, setting forth their rights and claims, to the end that homeopathic instruction be included in the curriculum of their state institution. The abstract of the minutes of the Michigan Institute of Homeopathy in 1849, printed in the Michigan Journal of Homoeopathy, mentioned the appointment of a committee of three to "address the Regents of the University of Michigan, praying them to establish a Professorship of Homeopathy in the Medical Department of that college" (I: 105). Even earlier, committees were appointed by various lay groups to formulate petitions of a similar nature. The first meeting of the Michigan Institute of Homeopathy in 1845 devoted a portion of the single session of June 12 to the question.
Previous legislation regarding medical practice in the state included a law passed in 1846 (Mich. Rev. Stat., 1846, pp. 168-73), giving to the state and county medical societies power to issue and revoke licenses to practice, and making all persons who practiced as physicians or surgeons without obtaining such license subject to fine or imprisonment. The result of the activity on the part of groups of physicians to pass laws favorable to themselves was an action by the legislature to place the question of medical practice and its control in the hands of the committee on the judiciary for investigation. In 1851 the Honorable Thomas B. Church, chairman, reported that "sundry petitions praying for … the establishment of a professorship of homoeopathy in the University of this State" were referred to his committee. He discussed the general medical situation in regard to its legal control and advised that Chapter XXXVI of the Revised Statutes of 1846 be repealed. This was done. Further, he recommended that the homeopathic question be referred to the newly appointed Board of Regents, "fresh from the people," who had been elected under the Constitution of 1850. The several petitions were referred to the committee on education of the legislature.
In the memoir prepared by Dr. Zina Pitcher at the request of the Regents, embracing an epitome of the transactions of that body from 1837 to 1851 (J. Doc., 1851, pp. 312-28), several pages were devoted to this question. Pitcher took a militant stand against any favorable recognition of the petitions or of the petitioners. One gathers that the author was expressing his personal views rather than the considered opinion of the entire Board. Petitions, both to abolish the Department of Medicine and Surgery, founded in 1850, and to establish homeopathic instruction in that department, constituted the immediate occasion for this part of the memoir. It must be remembered that Dr. Pitcher was the sole author of this review. However, a perusal of the document will explain the feeling that any discussion of the subject must have caused.
Several problems were satisfactorily solved with the election of the new Board of Regents in 1851, but the exact delineation of its powers was still to be determined. For forty years the homeopathic controversy furnished the trial material which at last made hard and fast the position of the Board in relation to the lawmaking and judicial bodies in