By 1814 Hahnemann had formed the Union for Proving Remedies, devoted to the "holy purpose of seeking new and indispensable discoveries for the welfare of suffering humanity.” This high-flying rhetoric suffused the proving literature; provers aided medical progress by “giving [their] time, even sacrificing [their] health.” They were held to a rigorous dosage schedule and submitted to regular interviews with Hahnemann. Self-observation, he argued, produced not only better remedies, but also better physicians and scientists: “the best opportunity for exercising our sense of observation and to perfect it, is by proving medicines ourselves.”
Hahnemann's followers brought his model of proving to the United States in the 1830s and 40s. One of these followers was Constantine Hering, a German physician who converted to homeopathy during research for an article intended to debunk Hahemann. He fled to eastern Pennsylvania's German immigrant community after his colleagues at the University of Wurzburg condemned him for his unorthodox turn. There, he established the Allentown Academy, a homeopathic school, and published the first American homeopathic domestic health guide; he would go on to found the Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia in 1848.
Hering was also instrumental in organizing a new version of Hahnemann's Provers' Union, promoting the same rigorous, systematic project of self-observation among American homeopaths. The American Provers' Union emerged from a meeting at Hering's Pennsylvania home in August of 1853. Its organization was quite ambitious: the eleven founding physicians appointed correspondents for every region from New York to Bavaria to Madagascar, so that the American provers could keep abreast of international developments. In a curious imperial metaphor, the Union's founders describe medical knowledge as “an immense empire which is our dominion,” with the practice of proving analogous to “exploring expeditions” by which homeopaths would annex “territory after territory...and state after state.”
The concept of a union was particularly important for a medical sect as embattled as the homeopaths: they wanted to present a united front against critics, but were often internally divided by petty disputes over dosage and characteristics of drugs. The Union would resolve such “reproachable animosities...without our injuring each other and the common cause.” Some homeopaths, the founding provers complained, were too absorbed in making money from lucrative practices to contribute their time to proving, while proving generated the knowledge capital upon which successful practice depended. The Union asked only for one proving per member per year – a modest service and a reminder of the common cause that homeopaths had entered into by rejecting conventional medical theory.