Marketplace of the Marvelous (8 page)

Thomson's distrust of the intentions of regular doctors was not completely misplaced. His success had attracted the animosity and criticism of many regulars, who denounced his system and looked for every opportunity to ridicule, punish, and accuse him of murder. The
New York Courier
reported that a Thomsonian had “steamed” one patient “into a corpse.” A Mr. Jackson was “stewed in hot and drenched in cold water, crammed with lobelia and cayenne pepper until the stomach of the victim was literally scalded” to the point that he “became delirious, convulsed and apoplectic and died.”
⁷⁶
The case, however, never went to trial. Thomson's belief that healing required no special training particularly incensed regulars. Physician Daniel Drake labeled Thomson a “demagogue” who posed as “one of the
people
” and accused regular doctors of being “not
of
the
people
, but arrayed against the
people
, and bent on killing them off.”
⁷⁷
Many Thomsonians “openly abuse learning and its advocates; yet they prate about nature's laws,” remarked a Mr. Sanborn in the
Boston Medical and Surgical Journal
. “They pretend ‘to assist nature' in the cure of diseases. How can they assist nature unless they know how nature acts? They are quite as likely to contravene the laws of nature as to co-operate with her, unless they have thoroughly studied physiology and anatomy.”
⁷⁸
Regular doctors pointed out the errors in his theory and his course of medicine, though Thomson's basic approach of cleansing and restoring balance to the system was strikingly similar to that of regular medicine. Regular doctors were not interested in finding common ground, though. In 1808, Thomson was accused of sweating two children to death, and a year later of killing one Captain Trickey. Although the charges proved false, Thomson fumed over the “fashionable educated doctor [who] may lose one half his patients without being blamed; but if I lose one out of several hundred of the most desperate cases . . . it is called murder.”
⁷⁹

Among the regular doctors who attacked Thomson was Dr. French of Salisbury, New Hampshire, whose successful indictment of Thomson for the 1808 death of Ezra Lovett came to haunt Thomson for decades. Thomson treated Lovett for typhus fever over several days and left him with strict instructions to stay indoors as he
attended another patient. Lovett did not follow Thomson's orders, however. Instead, feeling better, he left home, caught a chill, and suffered a relapse that forced him to seek the care of a regular doctor. Lovett died a few days later. Learning of the case, French had Thomson indicted and imprisoned in November 1809 for “willful murder” with lobelia. Thomson spent forty days in jail before being brought to trial before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, where he pled not guilty. The jury promptly acquitted him, needing only five minutes of deliberation to conclude that Thomson had acted in good faith to cure the patient with no intended malice. The trial only complicated Thomson's life, however, as regulars in several states continuously pressured state legislatures for stricter laws to outlaw unlicensed doctors. They also routinely called for and supported coroner's inquests into the deaths of patients under the care of Thomsonians.
⁸⁰

Despite Thomson's suspicion toward regulars, his system benefited from those doctors willing to challenge orthodoxy and express doubt about the efficacy of heroic treatments. Among Thomson's most prominent supporters was well-known American regular Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, who became the first to test the smallpox vaccine in the United States. Waterhouse was a vocal supporter of Thomson throughout his life, hailing Thomson's medical use of lobelia and vapor-bath processes as “valuable
improvement[s]
in our practice, if conducted by persons as experienced and sagacious as is the
Patriarch Thomson
.” South Carolina physician Robert D. Montgomery praised Thomsonism for its simplicity and for holding out a “helping hand” to the “illiterate and untutored part of the human family” by “snatch[ing] them from pain and death.”
⁸¹
The Thomsonians even counted the skeptical Oliver Wendell Holmes as an ally, a remarkable claim given Holmes's antipathy toward nearly every other irregular system, and one that likely surprised Holmes himself. The
Thomsonian Recorder
published several of Holmes's letters, where he described the beneficial use of vapor baths and expressed his appreciation for the healing powers of nature. Botanic remedies, wrote Holmes, were “in perfect harmony with life.”
⁸²
It should be remembered, though, that regular medicine included some herbal remedies and vegetable-based drugs by the nineteenth century, and many regular doctors praised the power of nature as a complement to, rather than a wholesale replacement for, heroic treatments. Even so, Thomsonians tended to seize
on any mention of nature and botanicals among regular doctors as positive affirmations of their method and their system's ascent to dominance.

Even as Thomsonism grew in popularity, various fault lines had already begun to appear among its practitioners. Many of Thomson's agents and followers began to push for medical schools and associations to train the next generation of practitioners and to elevate the professional status of the Thomsonian system. While it had been fine to empower the common man in its early years, they argued, a level of professionalization was necessary for Thomsonism to truly compete with regular medicine. An official Thomsonian school of medicine would help to codify the methods and provide some stability to the loose network of botanic healers spread around the country who had otherwise few binding ties save for a twenty-dollar investment in a set of instructions. Thomson, however, adamantly opposed these institutions, believing them instruments of privilege and monopoly that destroyed the democratic character of his system. His stated purpose was to enable common people to care for themselves, and those that sought professional Thomsonian care instead would “not see the importance of trying to obtain the knowledge for themselves.”
⁸³
Thomson did not want to subject people to domination by any kind of professional, even professionals he agreed with. Nevertheless, at the 1833 national convention of rights holders, the Thomsonians voted to create a national infirmary, and two years later, in 1835, to establish a medical school.
⁸⁴

Tension over these issues was exacerbated by Thomson's difficult and uncompromising personality. Not even poetry could save Thomson from himself. His near-constant paranoid battle against his perceived enemies, even his own agents and partners, and his bombastic lack of modesty embarrassed and angered his followers. Any ideas to change or improve the system were met with scorn and charges of disloyalty, even when those modifications might have strengthened Thomson's position in the marketplace. While most botanic healers sympathized with the tough course that Thomson had traveled and the persecution he'd faced developing his system, many now felt that Thomson had no more reason to complain. “What more does he covet?” asked J. P. Shepherd in the
Botanico-Medical Recorder
. “He
cannot expect to monopolize the plants which grow on Nature's bounteous bosom for all who choose to pluck them.” Shepherd contended that having purchased a family right, “I avail myself of the contents . . . as I deem proper.”
⁸⁵
Thomson's suspicious nature and powder-keg approach to leadership stunted the growth of his movement and forced followers to choose between staying loyal to their founder or breaking with him.
⁸⁶
It was a division that quickly tore the botanical system apart.

Thomson's agents largely led the drive to reform Thomsonism, with each of the major botanical splits fostered by one of his agents. As early as 1832, Ohio agent Horton Howard led the first major defection with the publication of his
Improved System of Botanic Medicine Founded Upon Current Physiological Principles
. Howard added forty-two botanicals to Thomson's approved list of herbs and set about promoting his updated system in a medical journal devoted to “improved botanics.” Unsurprisingly, Thomson threatened legal action to stop him, but Howard succumbed to cholera the following year and his improved system along with him.
⁸⁷

Thomson's own death in 1843 only sped up the fragmentation of his botanical system. Dozens of groups that used nearly every possible combination of “botanic,” “reformed,” “improved,” and “independent” formed. More intent on attacking each other than presenting a serious challenge to regular medicine, most of these splinter groups disappeared by the Civil War. American interest in botanic remedies, though, only continued to gain ground.
⁸⁸

Alva Curtis led a more enduring offshoot. A former Thomson agent and editor of the
Thomsonian Recorder
, Curtis believed that the science of botanical medicine was too complicated to trust to self-discovery and independent learning. While he appreciated Thomsonism's appeal and popularity among those in rural areas or those lacking formal education, Curtis also saw how its informality hampered its recognition as a serious medical contender among educated Americans in urban areas. The only way to compete successfully with regular doctors, argued Curtis, was for the Thomsonians to become more like doctors themselves. He had urged Thomson to open a school because he knew many patent holders did not understand how to use Thomson's method the way its founder had intended, which had the potential to turn patients back to regular medicine.
⁸⁹
“If you could travel through the country and see what bungling work they make of your practice, you would cheerfully subscribe to the establishment of schools to teach the application of that practice and the meaning of your precepts,” Curtis had tried to explain to Thomson.
⁹⁰
Teaching people how to use the system properly would help the movement grow and stem the tide of those turned off by their own misunderstanding of the directions. Thomson, however, true to form, had refused to bend, promising to do everything he could “to prevent his system of practice from being swallowed up in the vortex of literature and science.”
⁹¹

So in 1836, Curtis had broken with Thomson and opened the Botanico-Medical College and Infirmary in Columbus, Ohio. Three years later, the school received a state charter, giving it legal status with regular medical schools and making it the first chartered Thomsonian medical college in the country. The school soon moved to Cincinnati and went through a number of name changes before permanently settling on the Physio-Medical College in 1850, a name it retained until it closed in 1880. A dozen other physio-medical colleges opened around the country before the last shut its doors in 1911.
⁹²

At the same time, another botanical healing group with no direct ties to Thomson rose to prominence. Like Thomson, Wooster Beach studied with a local botanic healer and wrote a popular book on domestic medicine. Unlike Thomson, Beach graduated from a regular medical school in 1825. Suspicious about the safety of regular medicine, though, Beach opened a school in New York City in 1827 to educate students on botanical remedies. Unable to receive a state charter in New York, Beach accepted an offer from Worthington College (today's Kenyon College) in Worthington, Ohio, to open a medical department. In 1829, the Reformed Medical College opened not far from where Curtis would open his school in 1836, becoming the first irregular medical school chartered in the United States.
⁹³

Although Beach's followers insisted that Beach, and not Thomson, had introduced the nation's first scientific botanical medical practice, most Americans could not tell the difference between the two systems, at least in their early years. As time passed, however, Beach's botanic medical system enlarged, and his followers became known as “eclectics” for their pragmatic approach to healing. The name also associated the movement with American common sense rather than
the “pathies” of the other healing methods to come, including homeopathy, hydropathy, and allopathy, homeopathy's name for regular medicine.
⁹⁴
“Use anything that works” was eclectic medicine's only principle, a stark contrast to the hard line that Thomson drew around his system. The eclectics alone among the nineteenth-century irregular medical systems made no attempt to devise a theoretical framework to explain their system. They distinguished themselves only by their reliance on botanical drugs and their rejection of bloodletting: any other therapeutic treatment was fair game, be it hydropathy, homeopathy, or something else that offered relief. The considerable latitude given to followers allowed eclectic medicine to adapt far more easily to new medical discoveries and made it a popular alternative to regular medicine. The
Medical and Surgical Reporter
commented, “The Eclectics keep themselves alive by swallowing everything which happens to turn up.”
⁹⁵
More than sixty journals and twenty schools were established before eclecticism as an organized movement finally faded from the scene in the 1930s.
⁹⁶

Besides the schools founded by Curtis and Beach, thirteen other colleges were founded on Thomsonian principles between 1836 and 1911. Instruction followed Thomson's basic idea of restoring the body's heat with natural ingredients. They relied on Thomson's basic remedies—lobelia, capsicum, and steam baths—but purposely expanded the number and variety of botanic remedies.
⁹⁷

By the mid-nineteenth century, Thomsonism in its original form had mostly disappeared, eclipsed by the panoply of botanic splinter groups as well as by the rise of other irregular medical systems such as homeopathy, mesmerism, and hydropathy. Thomson's contentious attitude ultimately led to the disintegration of the movement he worked so hard to forge and undermined his appeals to the common man. Thomson welcomed every American to use his healing method but only if they did so on his terms—his devotion to democratic inclusiveness only went so far. He was unable and unwilling to compromise and, as a result, found himself forever engaged in quarrels, even with those like Curtis, who sought to elevate and improve botanic medicine to the point where it could vanquish regular medicine. Both men wanted the same things but profoundly disagreed on the path to achieve it.