Charles Edmund Fisher
Source: Southern Journal of Homoeopathy

Charles Edmund Fisher M.D. (7 March 1863 – 25 August 1932) was an American homeopathic physician who served as president of the American Institute of Homeopathy.

Among his many other roles, Fisher was founder and first president of the Texas Homoeopathic Medical Association, founder and former president of the Southern Homoeopathic Medical Association, Late Physician of the Protestant Orphans’ Home, San Antonio and Editor of the Homeopathic Text-Book of Surgery

Fisher was the founder editor of two homeopathic periodicals: the Southern Journal of Homeopathy, and the Medical Century: An International Journal of Homoeopathic Medicine, Surgery, & Collateral Sciences.

Charles Edmund Fisher was born on 7 March 1863, in the village of North Benton, Mahoning county, Ohio. His father was a Methodist clergyman whose ministry obliged him to move the family around the midwest, before settling in Lawrence, Kansas.

In the winter of 1870-71, seventeen year old C. E. Fisher began studying homeopathy, taking classes at Cleveland Homoeopathic Hospital College. He returned to Lawrence and, after training under father and son Dr.s Richard and Samuel Kress Huson, then the two most prominent homeopathic physicians in the state, Fisher qualified from the newly established Detroit Homeopathic Medical College in June 1872, and at the Pulte Homeopathic Medical College in Cincinnati, graduating in 1875.

After taking a review course at the New York Homeopathic College in 1881, Fisher established the Texas Homoeopathic Medical Association in 1884, and served as its first President. The following year, 1885, he founded the Southern Homoeopathic Medical Association in New Orleans, and was that organization’s first president.

In September 1892, Fisher handed over editorial duties of the Southern Journal of Homeopathy to Eldridge Cowman Price M.D. Fisher’s final editorial piece in August emphasized the missionary character of his efforts in promoting homeopathy in the American south:

With this number of the SOUTHERN JOURNAL OF HOMEOPATHY my connection with it in editorial capacity ceases All its properties have been sold by Mr. Engelbach, its owner and publisher for the past two and a half years, to a journal company in Baltimore who will continue its publication from that city under the business management
of Drs. F. C. Drane and Henry Chandlee and under the editorial management of Dr Eldridge C. Price. These gentlemen at once assume their respective positions on the JOURNAL and the August number will be the last under the present business management and the editorship of the undersigned.

When the predecessor and lineal antecedent of the SOUTHERN JOURNAL, the Texas Homoeopathic Pellet, was launched upon its missionary voyage at Austin, in August, 1883, it was little thought that the bantling would so soon doff its swaddling garments and bud into the full grown SOUTHERN JOURNAL with its wider field, its greater duties and its larger responsibilities. And when this journal began its career it was not appreciated that its responsibilities would assume the proportions which have characterized its history for the past few years. Could it have been foreseen how much of labor, how much of time, how much of money and how much of brain and nerve force would have been required to place the SOUTHERN upon the plane it now occupies, and to have brought about the results that have been accomplished through its efforts in behalf of Homoeopathy in the Southern mission field…

But with all that it has cost in time, money and effort, I feel that I can lay down the editorial pen well rewarded by a consciousness that its labors have not been altogether in vain. For, with all its shortcomings, and with all its failures to meet the expectations and desires of its friends and its editor, and with a full realization that its successes have not outweighed its failures, yet I am firmly possessed of a belief that no Homoeopathic journal published is able to show greater accomplishments in the line of pioneer and mission work than is the SOUTHERN, and it needs not a sorcerer to predict that its works will live after it.

In vacating the editorial chair I feel that I would be remiss if I failed to express my heart-felt thanks and good will to those members of the profession, North and South, East and West,who have so generously supported the JOURNAL during the years of my editorship, and who by their contributions to its pages have done so much to give it character and standing among the journals of our School . Without their generous assistance and their unceasing loyalty it would have been impossible to have successfully conducted a journal of the character of this in its frontier field, and they, one and all, are entitled to a full measure of praise and thankfulness.

I cannot leave the JOURNAL without expressing my heartfelt appreciation of the earnestness and intelligence with which its business affairs have been conducted during the period covered by the management of Mr. Engelbach. And I desire to thus publicly return to him my most sincere thanks for the hearty support he has extended me as editor, and for the numerous obligations I have been placed under by him during the time we have been associated together in the JOURNAL‘S work.

In November 1899, Fisher was one of the contributors to a series of lectures on homeopathy conducted at the Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital in Chicago. Fisher’s address, on “The Practical Side of Homeopathy,” enjoined the students to go forth into their medical careers with open minds, and an understanding of the historical record of homeopathic therapeutic success. Fisher drew on his own experience treating pneumonia patients in North Central Texas to demonstrate how homeopathic curative rates far superseded those of allopathic medicine:

“The personal record just given is not unusual in homeopathic experience. It is about the record of every well versed homeopathic physician throughout the length and breadth of the land. To us pneumonia is largely shorn of its terrors. A correct homeopathy knows no depressants and employs no stimulants. There is no see-sawing between extremes of vital tension, nor are the physical forces of the patient annihilated or maimed by a toxination from drugs that destroy. Acting in harmony with nature’s best laws, her strength is conserved, her forces are not battled down, she is given a chance. In pneumonia, as in all acute diseases, each case is led along gently, tractably, accurately, without medical coercion, the sole object in view being to assist nature as best we may while we make ourselves sure we do no harm.”

Fisher reflected on his life as an homeopath:

Born a homeopath, brought up a homeopath and a homeopath from choice, I have found it satisfactory and profitable, in every honorable sense, to be consistently a homeopath and always upon homeopathy to rely. Two years a homeopath upon the western frontier, nearly twenty years a homeopath in the South, and six years a homeopath in the more frigid zone of the lake region almost every disease has been met to which human kind is liable. Under pressures of one kind and another during all these years perhaps a fair share of backsliding has been committed. But it is not recalled that in a single instance wherein the law has been violated have the results been satisfactorily compensating, whereas, on the other hand, it is recalled that in almost every instance recorded on the tablet of memory good cause has been felt for grief that the weakness of the man has brought about the prostitution of the principle. No mariner abandons his compass in the time of storm, nor will the conscious homeopath who knows his law and realizes its power ever feel called upon to resort to the unsafe and less scientific procedures of a system whose strength is in numbers and not in law, whose might does not make it right, and whose record is stained with thousands upon thousands of blood-red blots which time nor repentance can ever efface.

In the spring of 1898, Fisher had spent three months in residence at an orphanage in Havana, Cuba, where he repeatedly demonstrated the practical efficacy of homeopathy:

The practical side of homeopathy builded upon the potentization of drugs has recently been revealed to me as never before. During a three-months residence in Havana last spring a protestant orphanage of nearly thirty reconcentraded children was brought under the influence of homeopathy for the treatment of chronic malarial infection, the dyspepsia and intestinal derangements incident to a Weylerian starvation, and general derangement of the vital forces through lack of parental care and the inroads of various types of disease. Not one of these little waifs had been properly fed for months, some of them not for years. All were emaciated, sallow, pot-bellied and anemic. In most cases the liver and spleen were enlarged and indurated, as were also the mesenteric, parotid and submaxillary glands. In a number the distortion was striking and the power of locomotion enfeebled. A sorrier lot of children it would be difficult to imagine. Their ears were ringing with quinine, their mouths druling from mercury. They had been drugged and starved all but to death, and their little orphanage was a veritable pest-house of sores from impoverished blood and the glandular indurations of tuberculosis.

From the moment they were placed under homeopathic care they began to improve. No remedy was given haphazardly, while the potency in each was selected with care. It was determined to test the virtues of the higher attenuations, for which purpose a tiny pocket case of dry pellets of the one-thousandth was relied upon. Daily visits were made for a period of ninety days, the cases being closely watched. Not a single vial in that little case was emptied. In but three or four instances was it required to change the remedy from the first selected, and in a number of cases but a single dose was given. The diarrheas responded to Arsenicum and China. The chronic agues yielded to Natrum and Lachesis, though occasionally Arsenicum and China were required, especially when complicated with intestinal derangement. Nux vomica and Antimonium crudum cleared up the dyspepsias, and Hepar proved a remedy of great excellence for the sores and eruptions on the skin and scalp. Iodium reduced the glandular enlargement and induration in several, Kali bichromicum being required in a few. Never have better results been obtained, in almost thirty years of bed side work, and thus a new practical side to homeopathy was revealed.

Charles Edmund Fisher’s movements over the next decade are unclear, but in March 1918 he was living at 432 Geary Street, in San Francisco, and had been granted a licence to practice medicine in California.

Fisher became a member of a group of San Francisco homeopaths called the “old boys.” Many of these were faculty members at the Hahnemann College of the Pacific. In November 1920, Fisher joined the rest of this club for a celebratory dinner in honour of William Boericke‘s 70th anniversary as an homeopath. The other guests present at Boericke‘s home, 3221 Washington Street, San Francisco, were:

Dr. William Simpson of San Jose, Dr. C. L. Tisdale of Alameda, Dr. A. K. Crawford and Dr. S. Boolson of Oakland, Drs. James W. Ward, Guy E. Manning, Sidney Worth, George H. Palmer, J. H. Buffum, A. C. Peter-Boys, F. H. Cookingham, S. Anson Hill.

All but Dr.s Cookingham and Hill were “old boys,” and Fisher recounted how:

A most delightful evening characterized the occasion, replete with reminiscences and reviews, firings and cross firings, sallies and toasts, with affectionate references to the original “Old Boys” of the coast metropolis, – Drs Floto and Ingersol, Albertson and Eckles, Currier and Selfridge, Burdick and Breyfogle, Lillienthal and French, Curtis and others who were instrumental in laying the foundation and building the first substantial structures for homeopathy which made it a power on the Pacific slope.

By 1922, Fisher was running a seven-bed sanitarium in Santa Rosa, Sonoma County.

Early in 1926, Fisher relocated from King City to Paso Robles, in San Luis Obispo County, taking over the offices of allopath Dr. Ralph Orlando Dresser (1876 – 1925). There, Fisher set up a hospital, the Paso Robles Hospital (later renamed the Fisher Hospital), at at 1732 Spring Street, Paso Robles.

That same year, Fisher was listed as a member of the “Gavel Club” of living past presidents of the American Institute of Homeopathy.

In 1930, Fisher gave up the hospital. Two years later, on 25 August 1932, Charles Edmund Fisher died in Paso Robles of angina pectoris, aged 79.

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Of Interest:

Arthur Fisher M.D. (1815 – 3 December 1913) [no relation] was a Canadian homeopathic doctor who lived and practiced in Montreal.

John Hayes Fisher M.D. (1880 – 1929) [no relation] was a Sacramento homeopathic physician. He was a graduate of the Hahnemann Medical College of the Pacific at San Francisco in May 1905, a founder and secretary of the Sacramento Valley Homeopathic Medical Association, and a member of the California State Homeopathic Medical Society.

Carl F. Fischer M.D. (1821 – 1893) [no relation] was a German-born, British homeopathic physician, who later practiced in Auckland, New Zealand, and Sydney, Australia.

Carl Fischer (1902 – 1989) [no relation] was an American orthodox physician, professor, and president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, who trained at the Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia.