Cincinnati public library 1870William Sturm (1796 – 1879) was an early pioneer of homeopathy in Cincinnati, practicing in that city from 1839 to 1876.

William Sturm was born near Leipsic, Germany in 1796. He was conscripted into Napoleon’s army in 1813 and was badly wounded. After the wars he resumed his studies and graduated in medicine from Leipzig in 1819.

William Sturm arrived in the United States in 1836 and traveled for two years before settling in Cincinnati in 1838.

William Sturm began practice in 1839 in Cincinnati. He was educated in Germany, and was a personal student of Samuel Hahnemann. He was first of the long line of fine homeopaths in that region. His skill and success gave him fame and a large practice all through the Ohio River Valley.

The second to come down the river to Cincinnati under the homeopathic banner was Joseph Hyppolyte Pulte in 1840.

William Sturm, it is said on excellent authority, began the practice of homœopathy in Cincinnati in 1839, which event gives him precedence in the long and honorable line of homœopaths who followed him in the field in after years.

He was born in Saxony in June, 1796, and was educated in medicine in Germany, a pupil of Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of the homœopathic school.

Sturm is said to have been a man of liberal education, and in medicine his success in the treatment of cases of an acute character gave him an extensive practice and proclaimed his name and fame throughout the Ohio river valley.

Like so many of the early homeopaths in America, Sturm was a German who corresponded with his colleagues in Germany as there were so few associations or institutions for homeopathy in America in these early decades.

Sturm contributed many cases to German homeopathic journals, for example the Gazette Homeopathique de Leipsig, Jahresbericht über die Fortschritte und Leistungen der Homöopathie in 1845, Specielle Therapie Acuter und chronischer Krankheiten in 1847, Der homöopathische Haus- und Familienarzt: Eine Darstellung der Grundsätze in 1855, Homöopathische Vierteljahrschrift 1862 and many others, which were then reported in American Journals a few years later, as they established and began to publish.

Sturm was able to witness the steady build up of organisation behind homeopathy in America, and he was elected to participate in the development of the American Institute of Homeopathy in 1865.