Discover a fascinating lost episode of American pharmacological history! A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book! The first comprehensive study of the American botanical movement, this fascinating volume recounts the rise and fall of nineteenth-century herbal medicine, the emergence of a second wave of interest arising from the counter-culture of the 1960s, and the recent herbal renaissance in the United States. In the 1840s the American medical establishment was under attack. Its opponents in the botanico-medical movement claimed that herbs and other natural cures were more effective and considerably safer than conventional medicine. They were right. Conventional medicine at the time consisted of ”heroic” doses of mercury and antimony, supplemented by Spanish fly and croton oil, with copious bloodletting as a treatment recommended for everything from mania to miscarriage. By contrast, many of the herbal cures espoused by the new wave of medicine were helpful or at least not actively poisonous. Unfortunately, the botanico-medical movement harbored its share of quacks as well. The history recorded in America's Botanico--Medical Movements includes useless or dangerous treatments as well as petty politics of the worst kind: schisms, public denunciations, physical brawls (with weapons up to and including small cannons), and vicious invective worthy of Hunter Thompson. The favored treatments and pharmacopias of Thomsonians, Neo-Thomsonians, physio-medicalists, and eclectic practitioners are all discussed in detail. In addition to its fascinating narrative, America's Botanico--Medical Movements offers hard-to-find source documents, including: a catalog of nineteenth-century medicinal plants the constitutions of several medical societies explaining their doctrines a libelous editorial attacking members of one of the schismatic groups patented formulas for fever medicines, emetics, enema preparations, and many other cures advertisements listing vegetable medicines for sale America's Botanico-Medical Movements provides a scholarly yet entertaining view of the rise and fall of a typically American medical movement. Pharmacists, historians, physicians, and herbalists will find instructive parallels between the nineteenth-century conflicts and the present-day battles between alternative medicine and the medical establishment. This fascinating book represents nearly 50 years of scholarship on the subject and offers the only comprehensive look at medical botany in this country.

John S. Haller,Jr., provides the first modern history of the Eclectic school of American sectarian medicine. The Eclectic school (sometimes called the "American School") flourished in the mid-nineteenth century when the art and science of medicine was undergoing a profound crisis of faith. At the heart of the crisis was a disillusionment with the traditional therapeutics of the day and an intense questioning of the principles and philosophy upon which medicine had been built. Many American physicians and their patients felt that medicine had lost the ability to cure. The Eclectics surmounted the crisis by forging a therapeutics based on herbal remedies and an empirical approach to disease, a system independent of the influence of European practices. Although rejected by the Regulars (adherents of mainstream medicine), the Eclectics imitated their magisterial manner, establishing two dozen colleges and more than sixty-five journals to proclaim the wisdom of their theory. Central to the story of Eclecticism is that of the Eclectic Medical Institute of Cincinnati, the "mother institute" of reform medical colleges. Organized in 1845, the school was to exist for ninety-four years before closing in 1939. Throughout much of their history, the Eclectic medical schools provided an avenue into the medical profession for men and women who lacked the financial and educational opportunities the Regular schools required, siding with Professor Martyn Paine of the Medical Department of New York University, who, in 1846, had accused the newly formed American Medical Association of playing aristocratic politics behind a masquerade of curriculum reform. Eventually, though, they grudgingly followed the lead of the Regulars by changing their curriculum and tightening admission standards. 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 support the implications of germ theory, the financial costs of salaried faculty and staff, and the research implications of laboratory science, the Eclectics were pushed aside by the rush of modern academic medicine.