Charles Frederick Menninger MD (1862 – 1953) founded the Menninger Clinic in Texas.
Menninger originally trained as a homeopath and in 1889 graduated from the Hahnemann Medical College in Chicago.
After receiving a second MD from Kansas Medical College in Topeka in 1908, Menninger visited the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where he was inspired to establish a similar institution in Topeka in 1919, the Menninger Diagnostic Clinic. This evolved into the Meninger Foundation comprising a clinic, a sanatorium, and a school of psychiatry, in Topeka but in 2002 moved to Houston, Texas.
Dr. Menninger was reared in his native Indiana City and was educated in the public schools there and at the Central Indiana Normal School, at Danville, Ind., where he graduated in 1882. He then came to Kansas and became one of the instructors in Campbell College, at Holton, Kan., remaining a member of that faculty five years. He then studied medicine at Hahnemann Medical College, Chicago, Ill., and was graduated in that institution in 1889. He at once located in Topeka, where he has since most successfully practiced his profession. Dr. Menninger maintains that a true preparation for the profession includes not only a study of medicine itself, but also a broad knowledge along all lines.
Menninger wrote that:
“It is imperative that we exhaust the homeopathic healing art before resorting to any other mode of treatment, if we wish to accomplish the greatest success possible” and “If we will but adhere with all energy and steadfastness to homeopathy, victory will be ours” and “homeopathy is wholly capable of satisfying the therapeutic demands of this age better than any other system or school of medicine” Transactions of the 53rd Session of the American Institute of Homoeopathy (1897, p. 427-431),
The Menninger Clinic made it’s name by their inexhaustible curiosity about the world around them and their enthusiasm for alternative treatments:
“Many migraine sufferers who were subjects in the Menninger Clinic Migraine Research Project had successfully used these temperature trainers to ward off or prevent headaches but finally to achieve a ‘way of life’ in which headaches didn’t occur.”
The Menninger Foundation Archives are held at the Kansas Historical Society.
Of Interest:
The Menninger Clinic still trains psychiatrists today who value homeopathy and Charles Menninger’s influence and ideas are still strong today.
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