The People's Doctors: Samuel Thomson and the American Botanical Movement, 1790-1860 (review)

John S. Haller, Jr. The People's Doctors: Samuel Thomson and the American Botanical Movement, 1790-1860. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. xiv + 377 pp. Ill. $49.95 (0-8093-2339-7).

The most famous American medical practitioner from the 1820s to mid-century was the botanical healer Samuel Thomson (1769-1843). Yet today he is considered a minor figure, partly because no significant botanical movement survived past the nineteenth century. Thomson was also part of the empirical rather than the learned tradition in medicine. He characterized his philosophy as "the study of patients, not books--experience, not reading" (p. 92). Many historians of medicine, like historians of science and technology, downplay the empirical tradition.

Samuel Thomson grew up in rural New Hampshire under conditions of poverty, hard labor, little schooling, and harsh discipline. He learned about botanical medicines from local healers and personal experimentation. Dissatisfied with regular medical treatment of his family, he began to treat them and others with botanicals and steam baths, and in 1805 he joined the numerous itinerant botanical healers traveling in the region around Boston, Massachusetts. He developed a numbered course of six botanical treatments, including lobelia, an emetic to clean out the system; cayenne pepper and steam baths, to restore bodily heat; and botanical tonics laced with wine or brandy. Although Thomson's botanicals were in widespread use, his system received a patent in 1813. His treatments were inexpensive, self-administered, and much less harmful than the regulars' calomel and bloodletting, both of which Thomson decried repeatedly.

Thomson's innovations were organizational. He purchased botanicals in bulk and sold them to patients and agents whom he appointed throughout the country, which expanded the market enormously. He authorized some general agents to purchase their own drugs and employ their own agents. In the early years, he sold "rights" to individuals in which he gave lessons about his numbered treatments to groups of purchasers so that they could treat themselves. He organized the right-holders into local Friendly Botanical Societies and encouraged them to appoint agents and sell rights and drugs. In 1822 he published the first of several editions of his New Guide to Health, which described his system, other botanicals, and his career. He and his agents sold the book and memberships in the local societies as replacements for the lessons. By the early 1830s, millions of rural Americans, who had always used botanicals, were practicing Thomsonism to some degree and reading Thomsonian magazines and almanacs.

As Thomson's system became popular, unauthorized vendors sold Thomsonian drugs and professional botanical healers adopted some or all of his treatments, often administered in their own infirmaries. Like many self-made and uneducated men, Thomson was insecure and combative about threats to his income and authority, and a poor judge of character. He frequently sued or fought with his own and unauthorized agents, with little success. To castigate and harass deviant practitioners and insure the movement's doctrinal purity, he organized a series of annual national conventions beginning in 1832. These only legitimized his opponents and produced schisms.

In the 1840s the growing number of educated Thomsonian practitioners ridiculed Thomson's assertions that his system was complete and final and that formal medical education was unnecessary in order to practice Thomsonism. Their receptiveness to new therapies and medical systems, and the resulting diversity of their practices and medical schools, doomed Thomsonism as a unified movement.

John Haller has unearthed more information about Thomson and the Thomsonian movement than one would have believed possible, considering its many ephemeral features. He has presented the material cogently, providing appropriate background information about the various individuals and organizations and placing each in appropriate context. The book is intended for readers familiar with nineteenth-century medicine, because little medical background is provided. It constitutes a veritable encyclopedia of a significant medical and...