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Abstract

This article traces the relatively early and successful establishment, institutionalization and professionalization of homoeopathy in the kingdom of Bavaria. Prevailing antirationalist and antimaterialist tendencies in "romantic" Bavaria made homoeopathy a particularly attractive option among parts of the clerical-conservative and aristocratic ruling elites. Building upon their support in the administration and in Parliament, Bavarian homoeopaths were largely able to ward off the legal restrictions advocated by their allopathic opponents. The first (honorary) German professorship for homoeopathy was established in Munich and a homoeopathic hospital prospered. In contrast to other German states, however, a homoeopathic mass movement failed to develop, presumably due to the relative weakness of bourgeois culture and to the enduring predominance of traditional "folk"-medicine as the major alternative to academic medicine among wide sectors of the population.