Samuel Thomson and the Eclectics

What it is

The nineteenth-century American botanical medicine movement — a mass popular revolt against orthodox medicine, and the professional tradition that grew out of it.

It matters here for three reasons: it is where a large part of modern Western herbal practice actually comes from, its politics explain a great deal about American attitudes to medicine that persist today, and it ended in a genuinely interesting place.

Where it came from

Samuel Thomson (1769–1843), a farmer from New Hampshire with almost no formal schooling, lost his mother and then his wife to the standard medical treatment of the day — which meant bloodletting, mercury purges, and blistering. His hostility to physicians was personal before it was ideological, and it is worth remembering what he was reacting against: orthodox medicine in 1810 was actively lethal, and calomel poisoning was a routine cause of death.

His system was crude and entirely coherent on its own terms. All disease is caused by cold; heat is life; restore heat and the body cures itself. In practice this meant lobelia as an emetic, cayenne to warm, steam baths, and a short standard sequence of six numbered remedies.

He patented it in 1813 and sold "family rights" for twenty dollars — a licence to use the system, plus his book New Guide to Health. He sold something on the order of 100,000 of them, and by the 1830s a plausible estimate is that a substantial fraction of the population of some states was using Thomsonian medicine.

The politics were the product. Thomson's slogan was that every man should be his own physician. The movement campaigned successfully to repeal medical licensing laws in state after state through the 1830s and 40s, on the argument that licensing was a monopoly protecting an incompetent profession. Given what orthodox medicine was doing at the time, they had a case.

The Eclectics were what happened next. Wooster Beach and others took the botanical materia medica seriously but rejected Thomson's anti-professionalism, arguing that botanical practitioners should be properly trained. The Eclectic Medical Institute in Cincinnati, founded 1845, was the movement's centre and ran until 1939. John Milton Scudder developed the doctrine of "specific medication" — a specific remedy matched to a specific observed indication rather than to a broad theory — and John Uri Lloyd, a pharmacist of real standing, produced concentrated standardised extracts and was respected well outside the movement.

How it is practised

It is not, as a system. Thomsonianism is extinct. What survives is its materia medica, absorbed into modern Western herbalism largely through the Eclectic texts — King's American Dispensatory and Felter and Lloyd's revisions are still consulted by practitioners today. Nothing here is instruction.

What we can and cannot say

We can say lobelia was the movement's real problem and it was not incidental. Lobelia inflata is a genuinely toxic plant, and Thomson used it heavily as an emetic. He was tried for murder in 1809 after a patient died following treatment; he was acquitted, and the case is a fair illustration of the risk in a system administered by anyone who had bought a twenty-dollar licence. Lobelia remains restricted in several jurisdictions.

We can say the licensing repeal is a genuinely double-edged legacy. In the 1830s, deregulating medicine plausibly saved lives, because the licensed practitioners were bleeding and purging people. By the 1880s, when medicine had germ theory and antisepsis, the same deregulated landscape was what allowed patent medicine — laudanum, cocaine and undeclared alcohol sold as tonic — to flourish unchecked until the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. The same political argument was right and then wrong within two generations, which is worth holding onto whenever anyone appeals to medical freedom as a timeless principle.

We can say the Eclectics did something the movement's founder would have hated, and it was better. They accepted training, examination, professional standards and pharmacological rigour, while keeping the botanical materia medica. John Uri Lloyd's standardised extracts are a direct ancestor of the argument this site makes elsewhere — that the useful step was measuring the dose.

And we can say the Eclectic school's record on admission deserves stating. The Eclectic Medical Institute admitted women from 1852, decades before most orthodox American medical schools, and graduated a significant number of women and Black physicians when the alternative was being barred outright. The sectarian schools were where people excluded from orthodox medicine could actually qualify. That is a real historical debt and it sits oddly alongside everything else here.

We can say the movement was killed by the Flexner Report, and that this too is double-edged. Abraham Flexner's 1910 survey of American medical education closed the great majority of proprietary and sectarian schools, raised standards enormously, and professionalised American medicine into something recognisable. It also closed almost every school that admitted women and Black students, and set both back by generations.

We cannot call Thomsonianism medicine. What can be said is that it was a rational response to a lethal profession, that it made a political argument which expired, and that the tradition it left behind is quietly present in every Western herbal dispensary today.

Further reading

• James Whorton, Nature Cures: The History of Alternative Medicine in America (2002).
• John S. Haller, Medical Protestants: The Eclectics in American Medicine (1994).
• Felter and Lloyd, King's American Dispensatory (1898), which is online and free.