A history of the Eclectic Medical Institute (EMI), and an account of the history of eclectic medicine, which competed with regular medicine in the 19th century. It recounts the feuds, successes, adversity and ultimate failure of this bastion of freedom in medical thought.

By the late nineteenth century, the eclectics found themselves in the backwaters of modern medicine. Unable to break away from their botanic bias and ill-equipped to accept the implications of germ theory, the financial costs of salaried faculty and staff, and the research demands of laboratory science, the eclectics were pushed aside by the rush of modern academic medicine.

A history of this high-brow school of medicine, Physio-Medicalism. They promoted the belief that the body has a vital force that can be used to heal and substituted botanical medicines for allopathy's mineral drugs. The author traces their establishment and their descent into obscurity.

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