Samuel Thomson grew up with a love of herbs, experimenting as a boy with the plant remedies that would eventually form the foundation of his entire healing system. (National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD)
Samuel Thomson believed poetry could heal. In 1812, he published his first medical poem, “Seamen’s Directions,” which combined ideological cheerleading with instructions for use of his remedies:
Th’ Emetic number ONE’s design’d
A gen’ral med’cine for mankind … Let number TWO be used as bold,
To clear the stomach of the cold;
Next steep the coffee,
number THREE,
and keep as warm as you can be ... My system’s founded on this truth,
Man’s Air and Water, Fire and Earth,
And death is cold, and life is heat,
These temper’d well, your health’s complete.1
This mnemonic poem was one of dozens composed by Thomson and his followers, who urged patients and practitioners to memorize one or more of them for proper results.
Instructional poems were not the whole of Thomson’s poetic offerings, though. He also used verse to deride the excesses of regular medicine and to celebrate the health benefits of herbs and other plants. One 1845 poem read:
They use [lobelia] in tincture, in powders and pills,
The patient it cures, but it never him kills;
It is first rate to cure in all cases of fevers,
But is hated and feared by the regular deceivers.2
Thomson’s poetic fervor sometimes spread to his patients, too, who couldn’t help but proclaim their devotion to Thomson and the healing power of his favorite remedy in couplets and quatrains.
Then LOBELIA, thou great Deliverer, come!
Purge from my eye this ochre hue …
Make me benevolent and true …
I’ll own, O LOBELIA! My virtue is from you.3
Poetry was popular entertainment in the decades before the Civil War. People of all classes read poetry, composed their own verse, and entertained each other with recitations of favorite poems. Poems on love, marriage, courtship, death, passion, and piety, most of which were penned by women, appeared regularly in popular newspapers and magazines. Men wrote most Thomsonian poems, on the other hand, and they tended toward the instructional rather than the moral or flowery messages that characterized the era’s other poetic outpourings. Thomson’s medical poems did fit the literary and cultural flavor of the era, however, providing both amusement as well as a passionate argument for the reform of medicine.4
Samuel Thomson’s medical system, known variously as Thomsonism and Thomsonianism, posed one of the first serious threats to regular medicine. Unlike many of the irregular systems that would follow him, Thomson’s was fully homegrown, an American invention in a field of medical irregulars that often began in Europe before crossing the Atlantic. His system posited that the cure for every disease could be found growing in the hills, valleys, meadows, and woods of America. Rather than the painful and often toxic chemical and mineral compounds of regular medicine, Thomson whipped up tinctures and teas and concocted salves from herbs, leaves, and roots. He became so famous and well known for his botanic medical system in the early nineteenth century that he earned the nickname the “American Hippocrates,” after the Greek physician widely regarded as the father of medicine. Thomson, perhaps, took the title a bit too seriously. His portrait in the frontispiece of his medical manual featured the barrel-chested founder with his high forehead and closely cropped hair bedecked in flowing Greek robes. Thomson brimmed with confidence in the rightness of his system and the horrors of regular medicine. He derided the arrogance of regular doctors and proclaimed that with his system, every man could be his own physician.5
Samuel Thomson claimed to have allied himself with nature from birth. Born in Alsted, New Hampshire, in 1769, Thomson learned about the healing power of plants as a child from family herbalist Mrs. Benton, who attended to nearly all his family’s medical needs. Domestic and part-time folk healers like Mrs. Benton were common in early America, where a healer’s reputation and authority came not from credentials but from his or her ability to make people feel better. Whomever people trusted with their lives and well-being earned the title “doctor.” Herb doctors like Benton made no pretense of education or medical qualifications, but they were popular and respected in rural areas like Thomson’s hometown, where the closest trained doctor was more than ten miles away: a potentially deadly distance depending on the severity of the illness.6
Benton’s self-taught skills and knowledge of local plants left a deep and lasting impression on Thomson. She collected her remedies from the woods and fields near town, and she allowed the young Thomson to tag along. “The whole of her practice was with roots and herbs,” recalled Thomson, noting with some awe at the time that they “always answered the purpose.”7 Like many young children, he put everything he found in his mouth, chewing pods, sucking on flower buds, and chomping leaves to discover, through firsthand experience both good and bad, the effect these had on his body. It was on one of these trips, when Thomson was only four years old, that he discovered lobelia inflata, a plant he’d never seen before and one with a “taste and operation ... so remarkable, that I never forgot it.”8 Large doses of lobelia taken internally cause people to vomit, an “operation” few could easily forget. Thomson’s experience with lobelia proved so memorable that it later became the foundation of the botanic medical system that would make Thomson a household name.9
Humans have cultivated and collected herbs, roots, and barks for medicinal purposes for thousands of years. In the fifteenth century, European exploration of North and South America introduced new plants to the herbal pharmacy, bolstering the use and importance of botanical medicine and spurring on colonization. Ministers reinforced the value of discovery by preaching that God had provided each region of the world with its own natural medicines. Christopher Columbus returned to Europe with cinchona bark (the source of quinine), coca leaves (cocaine), sarsaparilla, and tobacco, among other botanicals thought to have medical value. So important was the search for medicinal plants that the British crown ordered the seventeenth-century Virginia colony to cultivate gardens of native plants for medical research and experimentation. In 1620, the Virginia Company noted that its colony had great quantities of “Sweet Gums, Roots, Woods, Berries for dies and Drugs” and asked colonists to “send of all sorts as much as you can.”10 American Indians supplied a rich source of advice and information to colonists with their extensive knowledge of the New World’s botanical drugs. Indians knew plants that induced vomiting, reduced bleeding, stimulated sweating, and diminished fevers, all therapies common to regular European medicine but achieved through other means.11
Guides to botanic medicine became popular in the sixteenth century, and colonists brought many of their favorites with them to America. A New World filled with new plants required new guides, though, and in 1751, Benjamin Franklin published an American edition of the popular English herbal Short’s Medica Britannica with an appendix describing plants unique to North America. Early settlers tended to use drugs imported from Europe when they could afford them, and supplemented with native botanicals when they could not. Many people planted medicinal plants in their kitchen gardens or gathered them from the wild because medicine, like nearly everything else in the American colonies, had to be made from scratch at home. Among the most common botanicals in the colonial medical cabinet were catnip, dandelion, skunk cabbage, pumpkin seed, and mustard, few of which are used as such today. Some, like spearmint, peppermint, and wintergreen, were transformed from active ingredients to flavorings and scents in modern times. Almanacs and newspapers featured recipes for medicines, while other remedies were passed on through families. Plants still play an important part in modern medicine: nearly a quarter of pharmaceutical drugs are derived from botanical sources.12
Not every regular doctor welcomed the use of indigenous American plants, however. Some questioned the effectiveness of these relative unknowns compared with more familiar European medicines. But with European medicines often too expensive or unavailable, especially in frontier areas, nature cures became an essential piece of the colonial medical landscape.13
By the late eighteenth century, botanic medicine had increasingly found its way from home use to the therapeutic practices of regular medicine. Botany served the practical purpose of expanding the number of remedies available to regular doctors while also decreasing the costs of importing medicines and ingredients. Self-taught colonial botanist John Bartram spent much of his life collecting and studying plants and introduced one hundred new medicinal species to the European pharmacopia. In 1813, Benjamin Rush urged the trustees of the University of Pennsylvania to plant a botanical garden at the medical school in Philadelphia for the further study of American healing plants.14 Although herbal medicine never comprised a large part of the practice of regular medicine, most regular doctors possessed at least a basic familiarity with the centuries-old practice. It was Thomson who took herbal medicine to new heights.
Although Thomson discovered the emetic power of lobelia as a child, he didn’t put his discovery to beneficial use until two decades later. In the meantime, he amused himself, as children do, by urging others to try the plant and laughing as they discovered its unwelcome effects. In small doses, lobelia had a taste similar to tobacco and produced a euphoric effect that earned it the name “Indian tobacco” among the American pioneers. Overuse, though, caused the vomiting that so pleased the youthful Thomson. Lobelia’s physical power over the human body enthralled as much as it entertained Thomson, though, and he spent much of his early life experimenting with plants, learning from local healers, and advising his neighbors on his finds. In later years, Thomson rarely tired of relating his personal story of discovery and self-education among the plants of his hometown.15
The limitations of regular medicine’s healing powers became painfully clear to the twenty-one-year-old Thomson when his mother succumbed to tuberculosis. Witnessing the effects of mercury, opium, and other heroic dosages on her weakened system, Thomson developed an intense hatred of regular doctors and their drugs. He believed they inflicted unnecessary and gratuitous suffering in the name of healing with remedies he considered ineffective based on his observations. While he had yet to reach any conclusions about correct medical practice, Thomson believed that plants could do better and at less physical cost than heroic drugs. Any lingering doubts he may have had about the efficacy of the drugs of regular medicine disappeared several years later when his two-year-old daughter came down with scarlet fever. Intent on helping her recover without the standard treatments that had killed his mother, Thomson tried to cure her himself. He placed a pan of hot coals in water and vinegar beneath a chair and sat with his daughter wrapped in a blanket on his lap. He hoped the heat would eliminate her fever by raising her body temperature and inducing sweating. Her fever eventually broke and she made a full recovery. Regular doctors sometimes sweated patients too, but most did so with drugs containing opium and ipecac rather than through natural methods of heat and steam. Convinced that he had discovered the true source of healing in nature’s apothecary, Thomson renounced the drugs of regular medicine and dedicated himself to the practice of herbal medicine.16
Word of Thomson’s healing skills spread rapidly through his community, and by 1805, requests for his advice and medical assistance became so consuming that he gave up farming to practice medicine full-time. More than just a business move, though he had not been an enthusiastic farmer, his was a calling. “Every man is made and capacitated for some particular pursuit in life,” declared Thomson. “I am convinced myself that I possess a gift in healing the sick, because of the extraordinary success I have met with, and the protection and support Providence has afforded me.”17 To meet the demand for his services, Thomson opened medical offices in New Hampshire, Maine, northeastern Massachusetts, and later in Boston. He traveled continuously, treating patients and proselytizing the benefits of nature.18
Itinerant healers like Thomson were common in the early years of the United States. Thomson was part of a new generation of independent Americans who disdained authority and elitism and who staked a path to success marked by perseverance, hard work, entrepreneurship, and often a life on the road. In his travels, he likely shared the road with any number of bonesetters, mesmerists, Indian healers, and medical device and potion peddlers who passed through the inns, theaters, and public houses of the Atlantic coast.19
Thomson covered thousands of miles speaking the language of common sense and promoting a simple self-help system he claimed was as comprehensible and accessible as nature itself. He announced his arrival in town by issuing invitations to a public lecture where he explained his system of medicine. Taking to the stage or even just the corner of a room, depending on the location, Thomson announced his intention to release patients from the tyranny of regular medicine by offering cheap and gentle remedies that could be found growing all around them. He decried university-trained regular doctors who shrouded medicine in Greek and Latin terms that served only to protect the monetary interest of the doctor and not the health of the patient struggling to be well and understand his sickness. “There can be no good reason why all the medical works are kept in a dead language, except it be to deceive and keep the world ignorant of their doings, that they may the better impose upon the credulity of the people,” cried Thomson, “for if it was to be written in our own language every body would understand it, and judge for themselves.”20 The words were not the only problem. Thomson claimed that medical school itself prevented doctors from acquiring the experience necessary to effectively heal. “Their heads are filled with the theory, but all that is most important in the removal of disorder, they have to learn by practice,” which, Thomson declared, they never received in formal training.21
The truth of Thomson’s message lay in his own personal tale of woe and redemption. He began with his own family’s struggles with illness and the terrors brought on them by regular doctors, and then proceeded to his valiant and ultimately successful efforts to save their lives with herbal remedies. He closed the dramatic story with his decision to submit himself and his life to his healing gift, asserting that knowledge gained through life experience exceeded that gained in any kind of medical school. Finally, he offered to demonstrate on willing—and usually purchasing—audience members. It was a performance that would find an easy home on late-night television today.22
As he traveled, Thomson continued to test and refine his methods and remedies. In 1806, Thomson effectively treated several people, including himself, for yellow fever during outbreaks in Boston and New York City. Traveling with only a few remedies on hand, Thomson first swallowed a half cup of salt dissolved in a pint of vinegar. His strength returned for a time, but he soon found himself so weak that he could barely walk the few yards to his New York City boardinghouse. He immediately took cayenne and then bayberry, each steeped in hot water, followed by a dose of bitters, each ingredients that would soon find their way into his healing system. “I soon recovered my strength and was able to be about,” wrote Thomson. His successful experiments led Thomson to conclude that he had formed “a correct idea,” as his method restored nature “to her empire.”23
Thomson prided himself on finding a therapy that cured everything. Like many of his contemporaries, he viewed disease as a single entity. As such, every disease had essentially the same treatment. Thomson may have developed his theory in vocal opposition to regular medicine, but he reverted to ancient medical ideas to explain how it worked. Echoing thousands of years of medical belief, Thomson believed that the human body consisted of four basic elements that he called earth, air, fire, and water. Earth and water constituted the solid physicality of the body while fire and air gave that body life and motion. A vital power different from all of these gave humans life. This same idea underlay the humoral system of regular medicine as well as other vitalist medical systems. Thomson speculated that an imbalance in these elements, usually from some kind of obstruction, caused the body to lose the heat (the fire) necessary for health and life. To restore the body’s heat, Thomson proposed clearing the body of any obstructions through sweating, purging, and vomiting; cleansing with appropriate remedies; and finally reinvigorating the body through stimulant plants. Doing all of this with natural remedies, rather than the harmful poisons of regular medicine, became the goal of Thomson’s system.24
Thomson was not the first to associate cold with disease. Think only of the most universal of sicknesses, the common cold, likely named in the sixteenth century for symptoms that resembled those of exposure to cold weather. Ever since, cold weather and cold viruses have been associated, even if most doctors today do not believe that cold temperatures cause colds.25
In the beginning, Thomson relied almost exclusively on lobelia and capsicum (chili pepper, which caused an obvious feeling of heat) to heal, but with time, his system expanded to six primary botanicals. To these were added an additional seventy herbs and plants culled from folk remedies that could be found in most of the popular American and English herbal guides. He picked plants that stimulated rather than depleted patients as heroic measures tended to do because he believed that the purpose of medicine was to overcome any weakness brought on by the lack of internal heat. Thomson also sweated and purged patients like regular doctors, but he followed this up with invigorating herbs to restore patients from the weakening effects of these treatments; depletion without some means of renewal would only make the disease worse. Nearly all Thomson’s remedies had known medicinal uses before him, though he claimed to have pioneered the use of lobelia and to have expanded the medical applications of capsicum. Thomson kept the names of his six core medicines secret, untroubled by the inconsistency between his own practice and his vehement criticisms of the opacity of regular medicine. Numbered one through six, these medicines became the method of his cure.26
Thomson’s Number One medicine was lobelia, used to cleanse the stomach, promote perspiration, and create natural heat with its stimulating properties, though not enough heat to restore the body to balance on its own. That’s what Thomson’s Number Two began to do. Comprised of cayenne pepper, ginger, or black pepper, it roused the body and maintained the stomach’s heat until the system could be cleared of obstructions. At this stage, Thomson sometimes advised steam baths, particularly in cases of high fever that had not yet broken, to induce the sweating that would eliminate any remaining obstructions.27
These steam baths were followed by medicines to clear the stomach and bowels. Thomson’s Number Three remedy scoured the system with bayberry, the inner bark of young hemlock, the root of marsh rosemary, sumac, the leaves of witch hazel, or white pond lily. To further cleanse the intestines and lower bowels, Thomson often prescribed frequent enemas of bitterroot and bayberry, a mixture Thomsonians called “coffee.” The name likely came from the mixture’s dark color, though it could have come from the almost certain eye-widening jolt to the system that resulted from its use.28
After a successful cleanse, Thomson’s next three remedies helped to calm the body down and return it to proper function. Thomson’s Number Four restored the debilitated organs to their proper functions with various kinds of bitters steeped for tea. These bitter herbs and roots, like barberry and poplar bark, bitterroot, and golden seal, relaxed patients, stimulated their appetite, and restored the body’s natural digestion. Number Five strengthened the stomach and bowels and returned proper digestion with tonic plants like poplar bark and the meats of peaches and cherrystones mixed with sugar and brandy. Finally, Thomson’s Number Six, a mixture of gum myrrh and cayenne prepared with wine or brandy, which he also called Rheumatic Drops, eliminated any lingering pain and promoted natural heat. Number Six could also be applied externally when mixed with turpentine or gum camphor to pacify the nerves, relieve pain, and prime the body for its release from sickness.29
With the numbering of the remedies, patients had only to recall the instructions and count to six. To make the instructions even easier to remember, Thomson and his followers devised poems that served as simplified explanations of his system, as well as powerful polemics against regular medicine:
When sick, we for the doctor send;
He says, there is no chance to live,
Unless I deadly poison give
When this is done, the sick grow worse,
Which takes the money from their purse;
He says, “I’ve great regard for you,”
But money is the most in view.30
At times the poems, particularly those written by Thomson himself, ranted on without reasoned argument. But overall, the Thomsonian poems covered a full range of emotion and prose style, from rage to joy and from sonnet to song. Dr. D. L. Terry’s “The Botanic’s Song of Liberty” had rousing lines meant to be sung:
Merrily every bosom boundeth, merrily oh! Merrily oh!
Where the name of Thomson soundeth, merrily oh! Merrily oh!
There the bloom of health sheds more splendor,
There the maidens’ charms shine more tender;
Every joy the land surroundeth, merrily oh! Merrily oh!31
Memorizing these verses allowed followers to apply remedies without, Thomson claimed, knowing a single letter of the alphabet. The poems also provided rallying cries for practitioners forging ahead to remake medicine.32
Perhaps to bolster the case for the ease and simplicity of his system, Thomson professed to be illiterate in his early years on the road. This was likely a tough claim to make and maintain since his system spread in significant measure by the written word, much of it written by Thomson himself. Although he had never attended school in a formal sense, Thomson was far from illiterate. He later dropped this charade—and released a flood of articles, poems, and books—but the story never completely died. In 1841, near the end of his life, Thomson’s son John described his father as an “illiterate New Hampshire farmer” who nonetheless created a system that rapidly spread around the world, a reflection, perhaps, of the continued value many Americans placed on personal experience and self-education over a formal, classical education.33
Thomson’s success was due in large measure to his tireless promotion and democratic rhetoric that resonated with popular prejudices against regular medicine—it almost certainly wasn’t because of the treatment itself. The Thomsonian regimen could be incredibly tough with its courses of vomiting, sweating, and enemas: nothing about Thomson’s system implied moderation. One Virginia woman endured six months of treatment that included three hundred sweats and sixty-six full scouring and heating courses of Numbers One through Six. The method essentially mirrored many of the therapies of regular medicine but used botanicals instead of chemicals to similar effect. Thomson’s treatment was perhaps slightly better than bleeding and calomel but not by much.34 Thomson also willfully ignored the fact that many of the drugs prescribed by regulars, such as opium, also came from plants. In his mind, medicine could be divided into two opposing categories that Thomson correlated with regular and irregular healers: mineral and vegetable. Thomson assured people that his remedies were safe because they came from nature, but critics loved to point out that nature could be deadly, too. Nicotine and strychnine, for instance, were deadlier than many minerals. “To speak of the mineral medicines as being exclusively poisons and of the vegetable ones as being always harmless, when the merest tyro [beginner] in botany or materia medica knows it to be otherwise, is indeed passing strange,” asserted the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal in 1839.35
Like regular medicine, Thomson’s treatments caused immediately visible effects on patients. People could feel lobelia’s internal scrub on their organs and could hardly doubt the heat added to the body after a cayenne enema.36 Sweating, vomiting, and stinging pain commonly accompanied even the most natural of remedies in Thomson’s system. Patients expected medicine to hurt to know that it was working. Discomfort was part of the healing process, whether Thomsonian or regular medicine, at least until homeopathy began challenging that notion later in the century.
Thomson did not go unnoticed by the regular medical community. Regulars viewed Thomson with skeptical curiosity at first, but that quickly turned sour as he bashed their methods and claimed to have cured seemingly hopeless cases. Thomson treated patients for mercury poisoning, rheumatism, burns, and consumption. He found particular renown for his success in cases of dysentery spread through contaminated water and food. Regular doctors frequently treated sufferers with opiates that caused constipation and potentially harmed more than they helped by trapping the germs inside the body—not that anyone, regular doctors or Thomson alike, knew the true cause of the disease. Thomson’s treatments, on the other hand, purged and cleansed the body, which may have helped to pass the infection out of the system more quickly, or at the very least, the vomiting kept patients from ingesting more contaminated food and water.37
The name Thomsonism was applied to his system early in his travels. Regular doctors had their own names for Thomson’s cures, however “steamers,” “pukers,” and “despicable steam and pepper grinders” were among the most popular references to aspects of his treatment method. Practitioners themselves preferred Thomsonism, but such details mattered little to most advocates.38
Thomson’s growing reputation in the Northeast infuriated many regular doctors, but this animosity tended to work to Thomson’s advantage by clearly separating him from a profession that had already lost the confidence of many Americans. Historically, many of the people who had used the folk practice and self-care that Thomson built his system around could not afford professional medical attention and often didn’t trust doctors. Public dissatisfaction among this group and other Americans made regular doctors attractive and easy targets for Thomson’s promotional literature. He proclaimed that regular doctors knew nothing about healing except “how much poison [could] be given without causing death.”39 For many Americans, Thomson became a champion for the common man.
Thomsonism fit perfectly with the egalitarian spirit of Jacksonian America in the 1820s and 1830s. Like other medical irregulars, Thomsonians tended to attract people involved in other social reform movements. Thomson’s followers viewed their struggle against the dominance of the medical professional as a struggle against all forms of domination and control. Echoing the evangelical revivals that sought to elevate the moral condition of the nation, Thomson promised to improve its physical condition by providing the tools to democratize medicine and make “every man his own physician.” He encouraged people to engage directly with their health to be the agents of their own recovery. His books and periodicals dripped with folksy language as he sought to demystify medicine and call diseases by colloquial rather than Latin names. Thomson lashed out at regulars who attacked him and refused to even “stoop to examine a system on the ground of its intrinsic merit.” Rather than be hoodwinked by medical science cloaked in jargon and doctors out to make a buck, Thomson invited people to embrace his simple and natural system.40
Thomson’s faith that all people could be their own physicians clashed with the prevailing views of regular doctors, who thought little of their patients’ abilities to comprehend even the most basic aspects of medicine. The ever-skeptical Oliver Wendell Holmes believed the general public “hopelessly ignorant” of medicine, demonstrating a record of perfect “incompetence to form opinions on medical subjects.”41 Georgia physician J. Dickson Smith wondered, “If each man is to be ‘his own doctor,’ to cast aside his books, and act upon his own idea of the case, what becomes of the science? . . . [A]ccording to this logic any ten year old boy can practice medicine ‘scientifically.’”42
Thomson sold his method to patients through a prepayment system that operated something like a franchise. For twenty dollars (about $350 in today’s dollars), buyers earned the right to practice Thomson’s system on themselves and their immediate families. It was a steep price for the “common man” whom Thomson sought to win to his system. In 1830, the average male factory worker earned less than a dollar a day.43 The system could quickly pay for itself, though, with the average cost of one doctor-delivered baby running from twelve to twenty dollars. The franchise plan, known as “Family Rights,” proved extremely practical for Thomson’s fledgling business. Thomson, like most doctors, was vulnerable to the whims of patients who anxiously sought a doctor’s attention when sick but proved far less eager to pay for the service when well. Rather than keep track of a patient’s bills over his sprawling practice, Thomson secured payment in advance of sickness, like a health savings account for use when needed. As he lectured, Thomson provided only a partial explanation of his system prior to purchase; the rest came with payment.44
As the number of purchasers grew, Thomson encouraged his rights holders to form Friendly Botanic Societies to encourage the sharing of ideas and information. These groups received half the profits from the local sale of family rights, and they published their own Thomsonian medical journals and articles. Thomson’s societies represented the nation’s first effort to turn what had been a largely home-based, independent practice into an organized medical system.45
Perhaps more essential to the spread of Thomson’s system, these societies constituted a network of political activists committed to Thomson’s cause and willing to lobby and challenge medical laws on his behalf. Medical licensing laws invoked the particular wrath of Thomsonians, who believed they stifled freedom and oppressed honest and talented men who healed without the legal advantage of a diploma. Arguing his case against licensure, Thomson tarred regular doctors as parasites and exploiters of the masses who used licensing laws to gain elite privileges over common people. The Thomsonian arguments proved incredibly persuasive. Thomson’s own sons, John and Cyrus, both devoted botanic practitioners, pushed a wheelbarrow carrying a petition more than ninety feet long to the capitol at Albany, New York. During the debate that followed, one senator declared, “The people of this state have been bled long enough in their bodies and pockets, and it [is] time they should do as the men of the Revolution did: resolve to set down and enjoy the freedom for which they bled.”46 Thomson’s relationship with his sons later disintegrated after the New York State Thomsonian Medical Society, with John as president and Cyrus as treasurer, ratified a constitution that allowed certain qualified individuals to operate general botanic practices with the society’s approval. Furious at this imposition on his control over his own system, Thomson declared that only he had the power to grant this right.47 At a Hagerstown, Maryland, hotel in May of 1839, members of the Thomsonian Society of Washington County gathered to celebrate the passage of laws allowing them to practice legally with a formal dinner and toasts to Thomson and to John Wharton, the lawyer who worked on their behalf. They also passed a set of resolutions praising the wisdom of Thomson and his system. “Resolved, That Dr. Samuel Thomson’s trials and success have eventuated in the establishment of a theory supported by facts and experiments,” read Hagerstown grocer and president of the society Daniel Witmer to the assembled members. “That Thomson’s cause is the cause of humanity, that he has a claim upon the confidence and gratitude of the world, courts of law have decided in his favor . . . and the god of nature and providence has elevated him to a place in the temple of fame.”48 Maryland wasn’t alone. Between 1833 and 1844, thanks in large measure to the efforts of Thomsonians, nearly every state repealed or reduced the penalties for unlicensed practitioners, leaving it to the marketplace to sort out the true healers from the quacks.
As Thomsonism grew, Thomson designated “agents” to help him spread his system even further. Agents could sell additional family rights and prepare medicines while sharing in the profits of the sales. Many of these agents did whatever they could to sell as many rights as possible—and thus make as much money as possible—even to the point of exaggerating and misrepresenting Thomson’s system. A few agents took their role as franchisers to mean that they could set up infirmaries where they administered medicines and treated people reluctant to treat themselves. These agents became, in essence, practicing doctors, actions that won the harsh condemnation of Thomson for directly opposing the intent of his system. Some of these facilities had beds for inpatients, and one infirmary in Norfolk, Virginia, treated more than six hundred people in its first year. “It has generally been the case, with those I have appointed as agents, that as soon as they have been sufficiently instructed to attend to the practice with success,” declared Thomson, “[they] have attempted to get the lead of the practice into their own hands, and deprive me of the credit and profits of my own discovery.”49 Thomson also registered his disappointment with his agents in verse:
As Doctor Thomson’s Agent—he
A bond had sign’d, to faithful be
Unto the Doctor’s views;
His med’cines all, both wet and dry,
Agreed of Thomson for to buy,
And not his trust abuse.50
To protect his proprietary information from misrepresentation, Thomson patented his system in 1813. It had simply spread too far for him to meet with every rights holder personally. His success had also spawned a legion of copycats making claims similar to his own. Thomson’s decision to patent his medical system was unusual but not unique. Before Thomson, Dr. Peter Davidson had received copyright protection from the state of New York for his proprietary cancer plaster, a paste that inflamed, swelled, and then supposedly destroyed the cancer, and Dr. Elisha Perkins patented his electric tractors, three-inch brass and iron rods with healing powers. With his patent in hand, Thomson spent the rest of his life tenaciously and a bit pompously guarding his system from imposters.51
Thomson turned to Benjamin Smith Barton and Benjamin Rush for advice on how to publicize and win support for his newly patented system. The busy Dr. Rush had little time for Thomson, but Barton advised him to seek celebrity endorsement for maximum success: “[M]ake friends of some celebrated doctors and let them try the medicine and give the public such recommendation of it as they should deem correct.”52 Thomson appreciated the advice but feared that some unscrupulous doctors might claim his system as their own and deprive him of the credit he so eagerly sought. He trusted Barton, though, and convinced him to try Thomson’s system on himself and give his own recommendation. Unfortunately for Thomson, Barton died—not from a Thomsonian treatment—before he could render judgment.53
Thomson announced his newly patented system in newspapers and soon began appointing more and more agents to sell family rights to practice and distribute his medicines. Authorized agents often received notice in newspaper ads. “Dr. Samuel Thomson . . . now has the pleasure to recommend to the people of Boston and vicinity, Dr. JOHN LOCKE, who has had long experience in the practice and is well-qualified to administer relief to the sick,” announced the Columbian Centinel American Federalist, followed by an address for Locke’s office and an invitation to visit.54 Thomson moved his own office to Boston in 1818 to better manage and centralize his business affairs in a larger, more accessible city. By 1833, Thomson had 167 agents operating in twenty-two states and territories.55 Agents could sell rights to anyone who would pay. The right to practice on oneself and one’s immediate family still cost twenty dollars, but now buyers had the option of paying one hundred dollars to start a mini-practice for nonfamily members. Thomson and his agents made buyers swear never to share the secrets of the system, nor could they ever resell it, subject to a sixty-five-dollar fine for each transgression.56
Even with his patent, Thomson still faced the difficult task of protecting his enterprise and his name. The patent gave him some legal protection against those who tried to steal his system, but Thomson became so paranoid about his property that it became a source of contention and division among his followers. Thomson soon came to regard many of his agents not as allies and friends but as enemies out to steal his profits for themselves.
Thomson’s loose system of agents and rights holders made cohesion and unity challenging if not impossible, and made even more so by Thomson’s demanding nature. Thomson fought to maintain tight control over his system throughout his life. He insisted that it was incapable of amendment or improvement by anyone but him, and he dismissed any competing or new ideas as illegitimate and treasonous. He sarcastically accused one agent of palming his “literary pillage upon the world as a book of reformation, new discoveries, and wonderful improvements,” and called the efforts of other agents an attempt to “mislead and confuse enquiring minds.”57 Thomson’s annual letter to his agents became predictable for its recitation of enemies, unfaithful agents, and “pretended friends” who had tried to change his system, insulted his character, and stolen profits from the sale of family rights. Some successful agents established their own regional reputations and broke with Thomson to start their own more lenient and inclusive botanical medical practices.58
Thomson filed suit against many of his own agents, as well as unaffiliated pretenders, to defend what he believed to be protected by federal law. Many of his claims were successful, but not every case went Thomson’s way. With these losses, he could only print announcements listing the agents authorized to sell his system and denouncing everyone else as a botanic faker and quack, likely much to the amusement of regular doctors who saw them all, Thomson included, as quacks.59
Despite his admonitions against book learning, Thomson published his own book in an attempt to police the boundaries of his theory and to keep his system within reach of every agent and rights holder. In 1822, he published two lengthy works, often packaged together, the New Guide to Health: Or Botanic Family Physician, Containing a Complete System of Practice on a Plan Entirely New and A Narrative of the Life and Medical Discoveries of the Author, the latter an autobiographical account of his conversion to botanicals. The books used plain and direct language to craft stories of the patients Thomson had cured, including many who had found no relief in regular medicine. Thomson claimed to have taken on some of these cases reluctantly, worried that his method may not work on people who had suffered for so long. One woman in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, came to Thomson for relief from a venereal disease she had suffered from for more than five years. Her doctors had “filled her with mercury to kill the disorder” and then “left her to linger out a miserable existence,” Thomson wrote, adding, “I felt very unwilling to undertake with her, apprehending that it would be very uncertain whether a cure could be effected, [her illness] having been of so longstanding.” But she insisted, and after three weeks of treatment with his numbered system along with sweats and purges, “her health was restored, and she returned home well.”60
These types of stories filled the pages of Thomson’s New Guide to Health, providing illustrations of the many types of people and cases that he could effectively treat as well as the kinds of people he hoped to attract to his system. In contrast to the sometimes fantastical and inflated language contained in the literature of other medical irregulars, Thomson described his system frankly and without ornament, as though to emphasize the intuitive rather than miraculous nature of his cures that he hoped would appeal to commonsense Americans.61 Always careful of giving out too much information, though, Thomson did not include full instructions for his course of medicines. He continued to reserve this information for agents and rights purchasers.62
Thomson used his books to draw particular attention to the democratic character of his system. At a time ripe with distrust of professionalism and formal education, Thomson worked hard to portray himself as a friend and champion of the people. He explained how regular doctors wasted several years in school learning theories that had little relevance to daily practice when experience had long been shown to be the best teacher.63
Copies of the New Guide to Health appeared virtually everywhere in North America, going through twenty-one editions between 1822 and 1851.64 Thomson may have prided himself on creating a medical system that any illiterate person could use, but his own book clocked in at nearly four hundred pages, suggesting a well-educated following.65 The book spawned an array of imitators, including several from within his own ranks, just as Thomson had long feared. Some of Thomson’s agents sold unauthorized copies of A New Guide to Health while others, such as Elias Smith, who was, for a time, Thomson’s right-hand man, published their own botanic medicine books at a discounted price to cut into Thomson’s business.66 Thomson offered a reward to anyone who provided information on those who attempted to sell his system under any name other than his own.67
By the 1830s, Thomson claimed that more than a million people in a country of nearly thirteen million practiced his medicine, a number even regular doctors admitted was probably accurate. The proliferation of Thomson’s books and other literature attracted followers and provided cohesion to a movement that might otherwise have fallen apart in the consumer marketplace. Just a few years later, in 1835, the Thomsonians bombastically proclaimed that one-sixth of the American population practiced only botanic medicine, and that in some states, particularly in the West and South, the number was closer to one-third.68 “The people, the common people, have been found capable of examining, judging, and deciding correctly,” declared the Thomsonian Recorder. “Give them the facts, the whole facts, and nothing but the facts. By them, we conquer!”69 The governor of Mississippi corroborated these claims, announcing in 1835 that half the citizens of his state were Thomsonians.70 It was true that Thomson found his greatest success in frontier regions of the country, where trained regular doctors were virtually nonexistent and many people relied on home medical care by necessity. A simple system that promised to cure everything with natural remedies at a low cost held undeniable appeal.
Like the other irregular systems that followed, Thomsonism was particularly welcoming to women. In fact, Thomson was the first to recognize women as legitimate medical practitioners on par with men in an organized system in the United States. Thomson’s message that the family rather than the infirmary should be the primary forum for medical care proved a natural match for women, who had long acted as healers in their homes and communities. Thomson hailed the introduction and education to the plant world he had received from Mrs. Beaton. “All the valuable instruction I ever received was from a woman in the town where I lived, who had practiced as a midwife for twenty years,” wrote Thomson, saying “she gave me more useful instruction than all I ever gained from any other source.”71 Not only could women practice Thomsonism, but their special role within the family as moral arbiters and caretakers made them uniquely qualified to provide medical care. Women could purchase the right to practice Thomson’s system, just as any man could, and women were encouraged to buy and read medical guides, to establish Friendly Botanic Societies, and to act as agents. Thomsonian books often included information on female anatomy, conception, pregnancy, and birth at a time when women’s health was rarely included in health texts, much less discussed in medical practice. Thomson, for instance, advised women to drink raspberry leaf tea for birthing pains, which many pregnant women continue to swear by to this day. Chemicals in the plant may help relax blood vessels and the muscles involved in contractions. He also became an early proponent of the continued use of female midwives over regular male doctors for obstetrical care at a time when regular medicine had become increasingly wary of anyone but trained regular doctors attending to women’s care. “Thirty years ago the practice of midwifery was principally in the hands of experienced women, who had no difficulty,” asserted Thomson. “The practice of midwifery at this time, appears to be altogether a matter of speculation with the medical faculty,” depriving families “of their wives and children, by such ignorant and unnatural practice.”72 Thomson and his followers criticized the inexperience of male regulars delivering babies, their use of invasive techniques like forceps, and the high fees they charged for a service that women performed better.73
Among those to adopt Thomson’s method were regular doctors, though not everyone came by choice. Thomsonism became so popular in some areas of the country that many regular doctors couldn’t maintain their practices without publicly disdaining heroic drugs and bloodletting. Others offered patients a choice of botanic or heroic treatments.74
Ever suspicious, Thomson was seldom convinced that regular doctors had honestly made the switch to his system. He distrusted regulars who purchased rights or who appeared to embrace his system. Friendly Botanic Societies carefully examined the case of any regular doctor intending to switch, and Thomson directed agents to obtain a doctor’s written pledge to follow Thomson’s principles and to abandon mineral drugs, blistering, and bleeding. Regular doctors also had to pay more for the right to practice, up to five hundred dollars on a case-by-case basis.75
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.
For all his failings, though, Thomson’s anti-elitist and entrepreneurial spirit had satisfied the needs of many like-minded Americans. He effectively articulated the problems that many people had with regular medicine and provided the folksy language and democratic rationale that many other irregular healers would take up in the fight against regular medicine. More than just disagreeing, though, Thomson offered an alternative, presenting a theory and therapeutic solution in simple and direct language that anyone could—and millions did—understand. At his height, Thomson claimed to have converted more than three million Americans to his natural healing method. Although he probably exaggerated his influence, Thomson still achieved a high level of support that few Americans, particularly not those practicing regular medicine, could fail to ignore.98
Thomson hit on the marketing gold of selling natural ingredients for superior health nearly two centuries before it became commonplace. References to “nature,” “natural,” and following nature’s plan appear throughout Thomson’s New Guide to Health. He decried regular medicine’s use of drugs like mercury and arsenic as “directly opposed to nature,” and replaced them with plants and herbs that produced nearly identical results. “There cannot be the least doubt but there is medicine enough grows in our country, to answer all the purposes necessary in curing every disease,” wrote Thomson. The “common people are kept back from a knowledge of what is of the utmost importance for them to know” by the power and profit motive of regular doctors. Thomson marketed his system as harmonious with nature and proclaimed his ingredients as pure, familiar, and as harmless as the trees and flowers growing around his followers’ homes. All of the ingredients in his products were relatively pronounceable and recognizable, made by nature because nature knew best. Thomson’s promotion of locally sourced, natural ingredients would scarcely seem out of place today.99
Thomson also used highly innovative administrative and organizational skills to sell his system. Thomson was exceptionally energetic and diligent in patenting and commercially distributing his methods throughout the country. His medical patent, a strategic move, was rare even in an era where patent medicines had becoming increasingly common. The number of valid patents granted by the federal government for medicines was small; many just used the term “patent medicine” to mean “secret” or “proprietary” without having secured exclusive rights from the government for production and sale of their products. This business and institutional savvy sharply differentiated Thomson from the mass of itinerant healers roaming the country’s back roads and gave him a leg up in his attacks on the dominance of regular medicine.
Perhaps the most impressive and groundbreaking of all of Thomson’s tactics, though, was his system of distribution. More than a century before McDonald’s, Thomson established his own medical franchise system. In theory, visits with any Thomson agent were roughly equivalent, whether in Ohio, South Carolina, or Maine. This franchise system was perhaps the most American thing about Thomson, as he seized on the possibilities of the nineteenth-century capitalist marketplace to create an effective and efficient business model for selling medicine.
In 1838, five years before his death, Thomson agreed to have his head “read” by the famous American phrenologist Orson Squire Fowler. For a man with little praise for medical theory, not to mention regard for any idea that differed from his own, Thomson’s willingness to submit to a reading is one measure of phrenology’s growing popularity and influence; Thomsonism was no longer the only, nor even the most popular irregular medical system in the country. Consumers had more options. New irregular systems offered people an expanded range of medical alternatives. Premade medicines had become increasingly available and affordable, first in urban areas and then slowly moving out to the frontier. Fewer people needed, much less wanted, to make their own remedies at home.
Examining Thomson, Fowler found the sixty-nine-year-old’s head “very uneven,” suggesting a strong personality that “would make some noise in the world.” His cranial organs suggested that he “courted opposition” and angered quickly. “To say that he was obstinate, even to mulishness,” wrote Fowler, “is strictly correct.” Thomson considered no challenge too great, and he found difficulties stimulating rather than dispiriting. His social organs suggested a polarizing personality that inspired either fierce love or extreme hatred. Fowler concluded that Thomson had little regard for the “old or the sacred” and that the “general, cast, tone, and tenor of [Thomson’s] genius, was that of a plain, practical, common-sense man.”100
Whether Fowler determined Thomson’s true character from his meticulous head reading or from what he already knew of Thomson did not much matter. Thomson, the “American Hippocrates,” had left his mark on both American health and the business of medicine, paving the way for irregular systems that would continue to revolutionize the way Americans thought about health and wellness, and giving notice to regular medicine that something had to change.