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Thomsonian Patent Certificate c.1826
In the early-19th century, thousands of Americans in the trans-Appalachian west turned away from harsh conventional treatments, especially bleeding and purging, and embraced milder, less debilitating therapeutic regimens. Samuel Thomson, a leading spokesman of this movement, said he learned botanic medicine from a female herbalist who cured his wife after a regular doctor had failed. In particular, Thomson believed that cold brought on illness and therefore restoring the body's natural heat offered the quickest remedy. This he accomplished with steam baths, cayenne pepper, and puking by means of Lobelia, a native American emetic.
After a decade of local practice, Thomson outlined his principles in New Guide to Health; or Botanic Family Physician (1822). Thomson sold the right to use his system to any family for $20, along with a book of recipes with key ingredients left out. He filled in the blanks and swore the buyer to secrecy. $20 was less than a family might spend on doctors in a year, but far more than he could have made on a book alone. By 1840, 100,000 of these patents had been sold.
Thomsonian medicine was originally egalitarian and anti-elitist, in keeping with the spirit of Jacksonian America. In modern terms, Thomsonian medicine embodied a form of medical "empowerment" for families isolated on the frontier, far from established towns, and hence the medical "establishment."
But this circumstance did not last long. In 1838 Alva Curtis split from Thomson and created his own Independent Thomsonian Medical Society. Like Thomson, Curtis rejected the heroic bleeding and purging therapeutics of the allopaths. Unlike Thomson, however, botanics began establishing colleges to train and credential sectarian practitioners, dubbed physio-medical or physio-pathic practitioners. This populist movement was further diluted by the rise of reformed medicine, or eclecticism, led by Wooster Beach. The eclectics spread from New York to Ohio, culminating in the establishment in Cincinnati of the Eclectic Medical Institute in 1845. They would remain a source of contention in Ohio medicine until well after the Civil War.
John S. Haller, Jr. Medical Protestants: The Eclectics in American Medicine, 1825-1939 Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994.
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