A severe and prolonged attack of ague compelled the young teacher to give up his work in Fremont at the end of a year, and he did not return to it. Having made up his mind to study medicine, he now entered the office of the physician at the Auburn State Prison, Dr. Lansing Briggs, with whom he remained for three years, with the exception of one winter devoted to teaching. In 1845 he went to Boston and spent some time in the Medical Department of Harvard University, but seems to have been prevented from completing the course by lack of means, and therefore came back to Port Byron, not far from his home, to enter at once upon the practice of his profession. By his partner, Dr. Lewis McCarthy, he was won over to the new system of homeopathy, and a little later, after establishing himself in Buffalo in 1848, began to edit a monthly publication called _The Homœopathist_. The honorary degree of Doctor of Medicine was conferred upon him in 1851 by the Homœopathic Hospital College of Cleveland, Ohio, then only two years old. A year after his removal to Buffalo Dr. Lewis married Miss Helen Cecelia Clarke, daughter of a physician whose country residence was in the neighborhood of Port Byron. Three of her sisters had died of consumption, and in the fall of 1851 she herself began to exhibit unmistakable symptoms of the same disease. Her husband, who was already urging in his medical journal the importance of _preventive_ measures, at once undertook the treatment of her case by hygienic means. These appeared to be successful for a time; but in the fall of 1852 her cough reappeared, and Dr. Lewis thereupon determined to give up his practice and go South with her for the winter. Early in January they reached Fredericksburg, Virginia. It was not in the man’s nature to remain idle, and he was soon talking on health subjects to pupils in the schools. To identify himself with a cause which had excited his interest ever since boyhood he now joined “The Sons of Temperance,” but with a protest, his biographer[223] tells us, “against the exclusion of women from membership. He urged upon the leaders that in failing to enlist woman in the work they were leaving out the element most essential and indispensable to success.... Meeting only indifference to his appeal for the admission of women to the organized temperance work, he wrote a paper on ‘The Influence of Christian Women in the Cause of Temperance,’ and read it in a hall in the old town of Fredericksburg, Virginia, the same year (1853). This was his first appearance on the public platform. Directly afterward he gave lectures on this subject and on health topics in Fredericksburg, Richmond, Petersburg, Norfolk, and Portsmouth, Virginia.” The two succeeding winters were also spent with his wife in the South, where among other places he lectured in Paris, Lexington, and Georgetown, Kentucky. The same occupation was continued in New York State in the intervening summers.