House of Hering


The house in which Dr. Hering lived at the time of my association with him in 1869 and to the end of his life, in 1880, was located centrally between Arch and Cherry Streets, on the west side of North Twelfth Street. …


The house in which Dr. Hering lived at the time of my association with him in 1869 and to the end of his life, in 1880, was located centrally between Arch and Cherry Streets, on the west side of North Twelfth Street. It was a double house of three stories built of brick; the numbers were 112 and 114, and there were white marble steps leading to the front door, which was heavy and had a silver-plated knob and bell-pull. There came a roomy vestibule, then another door which led into a long hallway which separated the rooms on the first floor.

The door at the far end of this hallway led into a large garden with an elm tree, shrubbery, flowers and grapevines on a trellis. At the rear of the garden was a stable of brick, large enough to house a carriage and pair of horses. The entrance to the stable gave on Budden’s Alley, so named after a sea-captain by the name of Budden. Over the stable lodged George, the German coachman.

On the first floor of this double house were located, to the North, two large rooms separated by heavy mahogany doors, the one in front serving as reception room for patients, and the rear room for private consultation in office hours, which were from 10 to 12 in the morning, and from 4 to 6 in the afternoon. It was here that the doctor’s friends foregathered about the round table on Sunday afternoons and on those special evenings so well remembered by the many who were guests and visitors at the house, when hours sped by and were never long enough for host or company.

This large room held some of the doctor’s books and papers, particularly his clinical notes which filled shelf upon shelf behind a red, curtain, running along the wall and reaching to the top of the ceiling on the South side of the room. At the rear end were two large windows which gave into the garden. Before one of these stood an aquarium, oblong in shape, in which were kept goldfish and the usual aquatic plants, pebbles and objects shaped from stone.

There, too, in the corner, was a large cabinet which contained the Zentmayer microscope, with slides and appurtenances used in mounting specimens; also books explaining the wonders of the microscope. Before one of the windows stood the doctor’s easy chair, with gothic back and arm-rests, in which he spent an occasional half hour reading or meditating when patients had been dismissed or while waiting for the supper hour.

In this room Dr. Hering’s intimate friends gathered on Sunday afternoons, for long talks over coffee and cigars, discussing homoeopathy, science, art, and the affairs of the nation; conversations in which Dr. Hering led and which called to mind the classic Addison and the Round Table. In this familiar room Dr. Hering received visiting colleagues and talked to a class of students on Saturday nights.

On the South side of the hallway, nearest the street, was located a smaller room the doctor’s office in which he received male patients and which held his medicines, books of reference, and his account books. There were two desks, in this room at one of which sat Dr. Hering, at the other his assistant who put up the prescriptions, and a table, by one of the windows, at which, after consulting hours, sat the doctor’s whitehaired German secretary, Dr.Knabe, whose duty it was to copy Dr. Hering’s manuscripts in handwriting so neatly done as to resemble steel engraving. Next to this room to the West, was passage way leading to the stairs and to the dining-room.

The doctor’s family was large, requiring a long table, running the length of the room, generally seating eight or ten, and on extra occasions as many as eighteen or more people. On the walls of this room were hung wood engravings representing scenes from the hunt, made by an artist friend named Traubel. Back of the dining-room, was a small room into which was built a large refrigerator, containing a coil of lead-pipe on which rested a block of ice which served the double purpose of cooling the drinking water, and keeping fresh the contents of this receptacle built of wood and lined with metal.

Back of this pantry was a short passageway which led past the back stairs to a roomy kitchen, with a large old-fashioned coal-range, the one which figured in giving such prompt relief to the doctor’s left hand and arm when poisoned by the fangs of a dead rattlesnake, a circumstance to be mentioned later. Both the cook and waitress were German girls who had been in the family for a long time. There was a third servant, the door-girl, who spoke both languages and sat in one of the offices making powders in spare moments. This raised the number of help in Dr. Hering’s family to four; three women and George, the coachman, all of them German, excepting the office girl, who was American born.

NOTES FROM MY DIARY. April, 21, 1869. Dr. Hering speaks of an extraordinary man, a Professor Roehrig, who has a great talent for acquiring foreign languages. When a boy Roehrig found an Arabic grammar, in Dr. Hering’s library. He seized upon it and took it away with him to study the language along with his other work. In a short time he had mastered Arabic. Later, in Europe, he encountered some Arabs and Turks at a Fair, whom he addressed, to their great astonishment, in their native tongue, which brought him into notice.

He had already mastered a number of other languages, including German, French, Italian, etc., which knowledge secured him a position on a Prussian expedition to Russia. He was then only fourteen years old. While visiting Constantinople he learned the Persian and Chaldean languages. Wherever he saw an outlandish person he made his acquaintance and very soon was able to speak the language. While in Russia he committed the innocent blunder of writing sonnets to the sultan, in the Russian language, for which offence his Prussian embassy sent him home. Although said to speak twenty languages fluently, he is unable to speak the Pennsylvania German dialect.

Roehrig placed documents in Dr. Hering’s hands from which a history of his life might be written. He has a wife, at present engaged as a seamstress in the Hering family, while her husband is in New York trying to earn some money. The wife speaks in the highest terms of her husband, who seems to neglect her. Jahr’s Therapeutic Guide.

In the evening I am occupied with scissors cutting symptoms copied by the secretary from Jahr’s Therapeutic Guide. These are intended to go into the work on Materia Medica. These symptoms, written on slips of paper, Dr. Hering pastes on sheets of brown manila paper, in an order which, he says: Enables him to look behind the scenes. He says he has done this with Guernsey and Raue’s books; claims that Raue did not like this so well.

MacFarlan. Dr. Malcolm MacFarlan is elected to give a course of lectures at the College on operative surgery in the coming fall. Both Koch and Raue were opposed to MacFarlan’s election. Doctors Gause, Thomas, Martin and Hering, likewise Morgan, who specialized in surgery, were in his favor. MacFarlan was married yesterday to a rich florist’s daughter. Flowering Plants. Has their color relation to the spectroscope? Acids.

Hering is trying to find out if the way in which the flowers of medicinal plants are coloured any relation to the spectroscope. He presumes that red-flowering plants act upon one side of the body, while blue-flowering ones affect the other side.

In certain combinations the mineral acids have a predominating number of symptoms, leaving those from organic acids in the background.

Primary colours, red, blue and yellow, are represented in a diagram as occupying the three corners of a triangle, red standing for Lithium, blue for Kali, and yellow for Natrum. John Hering.

While at table Dr. Hering received a letter from his oldest son, John, who lives in Surinam, South America. He said jocosely: Oh this is from my oldest, good-for-nothing son, John Take it to my wife and let her read it. Houatt’s Provings.

Houatt, a Frenchman, has made provings of Kali hydriodicum, Sarracenia, etc. It is questionable if his provings are reliable.

This Houatt made an experiment which Hering had proposed to Hahnemann twenty-five years ago, viz: to select for proving twelve medicines, in the 200th potency, the names of which were to be carefully sealed to the observer, only to be revealed by symptoms obtained from the provings. Houatt proved Belladonna in the manner prescribed, obtained about three hundred symptoms, two-thirds of which showed the character of the remedy.

April 22, 1869. Hegel. Hegel, who wrote books on philosophy, did not know the difference between the two electricities. Kill or Cure.

A young man who had suffered a long time from intermittent fever came to me with a doleful tale. He wished to marry the daughter of a rich manufacturer. He could only get her on condition that he would be able to fill the position of fireman in her father’s establishment. This, he said, was impossible on account of his being harassed by chills and fever. The young fellow was desperate; said he would either drown or shoot himself if he could not be relieved of the malady. He demanded of me a prescription which would either ‘kill or cure’

Calvin B Knerr
Calvin Knerr was born December 27, 1847 and grew up with a father who was a lay homeopath and an uncle who knew Hering at the Allentown Academy. He attended The Allentown College Institute and graduated from Hahnemann Medical College in 1869.He then entered the office of Dr. Constantine Hering as his assistant. The diary he kept while living in Hering's house became The Life of Hering, published in 1940.
In 1878 and 1879 he published 2 editions of his book, Sunstroke and Its Homeopathic Treatment.
Upon Hering's death in 1880 Knerr became responsible for the completion of the 10-volume Guiding Symptoms.
Dr. Knerr wrote 2-volume Repertory to the Guiding Symptoms,