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(More customer reviews)From Wooster Beech's founding of the eclectic medical movement in the 1820s as "Reformed Medicine" to the final closing of Cincinnati's Eclectic Medical College in 1939, this botanical movement influenced the practice of the healing arts in America's heartland in significant ways. Now at long last we have a thorough, objective treatment of these colorful practitioners in John Haller's _Medical Protestants_.
Until this book, the only remotely similar work was Alexander Wilder's _History of Medicine_ (1899), a highly partisan and not always reliable account of eclecticism. Most modern treatments have been confined to articles analyzing one or just a few aspects of eclecticisim. But Haller's treatment is comprehensive, covering all aspects of this group devoted primarily to herbal remedies in opposition to the allopathic (i.e., regular) physicians' practice of heroic therapies like bleeding, purging, and massive dosing with calomel. Neither dismissing the eclectics as quacks nor uncritically eulogizing them as progressive mavericks, Haller's assessment is balanced and his conclusions are well supported by primary resources.
Readers will find Haller's writing lively and the book well illustrated. No one interested in herbal medicine or the history of the American sectarian medical movement should miss this book. It is destined to be cited for years to come -- and deservedly so
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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.
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