A three-story brick Victorian institutional building on a rock-faced stone base, set on a corner at Jefferson Avenue and Howard Street. Its two street fronts met at a canted corner bay crowned by a steep pyramidal tower with a louvered dormer and finial, and the parapets carried carved datestones — 1886 and 1887 — above bands of corbeled brick arcading. Round-arched windows with molded brick hoods lined the upper floors, and the main entrance was a heavy round-arched opening beside a carved stone tablet lettered HOMEOPATHIC MEDICAL COLLEGE OF MISSOURI. Slender brick pinnacles rose at the corners of the front gable.
The Homeopathic Medical College of Missouri was founded in 1857, one of several St. Louis schools that trained physicians in homeopathy, the alternative system of medicine then popular across the United States. It was among the more enduring of the city's many nineteenth-century medical colleges, a number of which were short-lived proprietary ventures. This building at Jefferson Avenue and Howard Street, on the near north side, was raised in 1886–1887, its front dated by twin stones reading 1886 and 1887. The college taught here through the turn of the century but did not outlast the reform of American medical education: as scientific, laboratory-based training became the standard and homeopathy fell from favor, the school closed in 1909. Its building has since been lost. The photograph that records it was made about 1890 by Emil Boehl, one of St. Louis's leading commercial photographers of the late nineteenth century.
