Eclectic medicine

The Eclectics were a movement of American physicians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They opposed the harsh medicine of their time, with bloodletting and poisonous remedies such as mercury. Instead they worked mainly with plants.

The movement had roots in the folk medicine of the settlers and in the knowledge of Indigenous peoples. Samuel Thomson, a herbal healer from New Hampshire, patented his own system in 1813, with lobelia and cayenne pepper as its main remedies.

Wooster Beach founded a school in New York and called his approach “reformed medicine”. From it grew Eclectic medicine. The Eclectic Medical Institute began in 1833 in Worthington, Ohio, and had students in Cincinnati from 1845 to 1939.

The word eclectic means “selecting”: the Eclectics chose from every tradition whatever they believed worked. They wanted to support the body’s natural healing instead of weakening it.

In 1870 John Milton Scudder developed “specific medication”: for each remedy physicians looked for the precise signs in which it helped, such as the colour of the tongue or the pulse.

The Eclectics worked with tinctures and extracts of plants, which they wanted to make as pure as possible.

The Eclectics had their own schools, journals and associations. At their peak, at the end of the nineteenth century, there were thousands of Eclectic physicians in the United States.

An important figure was the pharmacist John Uri Lloyd. With his brothers he founded a company in Cincinnati that made pure plant extracts. He was also a professor at the Eclectic Medical Institute.

After the Flexner Report of 1910, which reformed medical education in the United States, the Eclectic schools lost their place. The last one closed in 1939.

The most important work is King’s American Dispensatory, originally by John King. The great edition of 1898, by Harvey Wickes Felter and John Uri Lloyd, describes hundreds of plants and is still a reference work for herbalists today.

The Lloyd Library and Museum in Cincinnati holds a large collection of books on plant medicine and Eclectic medicine.

Scudder’s 1870 work on specific medication is also important.

Eclectic medicine no longer exists as a movement, but its influence is great. Modern herbalists in the United States and Europe still use the knowledge in King’s American Dispensatory.

Many plants the Eclectics made popular, such as echinacea, are known worldwide.

The Eclectics show that plant medicine was once simply part of Western medicine.

The Eclectics used hundreds of plants, many from Indigenous use. They made Echinacea famous: the merchant H.C.F. Meyer drew attention to it in the 1880s, and Lloyd and King made it an important remedy.

Other important plants were lobelia, goldenseal, black cohosh, blue cohosh, bloodroot and mayapple.

They made tinctures and extracts of plants that were as pure as possible.

The Eclectics built on the knowledge of Indigenous peoples, often without acknowledging it.

Some of the remedies they used are poisonous, such as mayapple and lobelia in high doses. Their books are history, not a manual.