[4] Apparently a lack of funds prevented him from finishing the course there, and upon leaving he immediately opened up a medical practice in Port Byron, New York.

[1][2] His partner in that practice, Lewis McCarthy, interested him in homeopathy,[2] and he attended the Homeopathic Hospital College of Cleveland, Ohio.

In 1856 he visited Paris for a short time to obtain material for his physiology lectures and used the opportunity to attend clinics in some of the city hospitals.

A lecture at a conference in Boston in August 1860 brought the new system to the attention of educators from across the United States.

Lewis's influence had much to do with the establishment of the present system of physical culture in most of the institutions of learning in the United States.

[8] For three years, 1864–1867, Lewis ran a school for girls at Lexington, Massachusetts, in which Theodore Dwight Weld was a leading teacher, and Catharine Beecher was for a time one of the lecturers.

In September 1867, the school building was burned, and, although temporary quarters were at once secured in a summer hotel at Spy Pond, the project was abandoned at the close of another year.

In these lectures he instructed women to ask local dispensers of alcoholic beverages to sign pledges that they would cease to sell.

He urged women to be the sole participants in these acts, in order to aggrandize the emotional force of the movement.

It was and is still the largest mass movement of women to date.... [Frances Willard], the second national president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, wrote later in her memoirs, that the crusade “was like the fires we used to kindle on the western prairies, a match and a wisp of grass were all that was needed, and behold the spectacle of a prairie on fire sweeping across the landscape, swift as a thousand untrained steeds and no more to be captured than a hurricane".

Most of the saloons that closed as a result of prayer vigils opened again a few days later to meet the public demand for alcoholic beverages.