Eclectic Herbalism: The American School
Eclectic herbalism is the medicine of the Eclectic physicians, an American school of doctors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who practised with plant medicines, chiefly the native plants of North America, in place of the bleeding, mercury, and purging of the regular physicians, and who took their name from the intention to select whatever worked from any source. Their method was specific medication, the matching of a concentrated plant preparation to a precise set of signs in the patient, and their texts, King's American Dispensatory, Felter's Eclectic Materia Medica, and Ellingwood's American Materia Medica, are the foundation of American herbal practice and the source of most of what Western herbalism knows about Echinacea, Goldenseal, Black Cohosh, and the other American plants.
Who they were
Wooster Beach, 1794 to 1868, a New York physician who had studied with a German herb doctor, founded the movement and its first school, the Reformed Medical College in New York, around 1830, and a second in Worthington, Ohio. The school that mattered was the Eclectic Medical Institute in Cincinnati, chartered in 1845, which trained Eclectic physicians for nearly a century and closed in 1939, the last of the sectarian medical schools to go after the Flexner Report of 1910 had turned the country's medical education toward the laboratory and the regular profession. Cincinnati was the movement's capital. John King, 1813 to 1893, professor there, compiled the American Dispensatory from 1852, and it was King who introduced the resinoids, concentrated plant extracts, and then abandoned them when they proved inert. John Milton Scudder, 1829 to 1894, remade the school's doctrine with Specific Medication and Specific Medicines in 1870. John Uri Lloyd, 1849 to 1936, the pharmacist of the movement, manufactured its Specific Medicines at Lloyd Brothers in Cincinnati, wrote on echinacea and on pharmacy, and founded with his brothers the Lloyd Library, which still stands in Cincinnati and holds the movement's books. Harvey Wickes Felter, 1865 to 1927, revised King's Dispensatory with Lloyd in 1898, the edition used today, and wrote The Eclectic Materia Medica, Pharmacology and Therapeutics in 1922. Finley Ellingwood, 1852 to 1920, of Chicago, wrote the American Materia Medica, Therapeutics and Pharmacognosy, whose 1919 edition is the one reprinted.
The Eclectics are distinguished from the physiomedicalists, the other American plant school. Physiomedicalism descends from Samuel Thomson, 1769 to 1843, the New Hampshire farmer whose New Guide to Health of 1822 taught cayenne, lobelia, and the steam bath to the public by patent, and it was systematised by Alva Curtis and by William Cook, whose Physio-Medical Dispensatory of 1869 is its materia medica, and by J. M. Thurston in The Philosophy of Physiomedicalism of 1900. The physiomedicalists held that only non-poisonous plants that work with the vital force are medicine; the Eclectics used what worked, including drop doses of the toxic plants, Gelsemium, Aconite, Veratrum, and Belladonna. Physiomedicalism went to England with Thomson's followers and shaped the National Association of Medical Herbalists, founded in 1864, from which British medical herbalism descends.
What they held
Specific medication is the Eclectic contribution. The physician does not treat a named disease; the physician reads the tongue, the pulse, the skin, the temperature, the colour, the secretions, and the mental state, finds among them the specific indications, and gives the one plant whose indications they are, in a small dose, repeated often, usually as a few drops of Specific Medicine in a glass of water taken by the spoonful through the day. A pale, broad, moist tongue calls for one remedy; a red, narrow, dry one for another; a dusky, purplish one for a third, and Scudder's Specific Diagnosis is a catalogue of such signs. Echinacea, Echinacea angustifolia, came into medicine this way: a Nebraska patent-medicine seller, H. C. F. Meyer, brought it to King and Lloyd in the 1880s, and the Eclectics made it their remedy for sepsis, snakebite, and foul discharges before it went to Germany in the 1930s with Madaus and came back as the cold remedy the world knows. Goldenseal, Hydrastis canadensis, for the atonic mucous membrane; Black Cohosh, Actaea racemosa, for the dull aching of muscle and womb; Passionflower, Passiflora incarnata, for the sleepless and the convulsive; Collinsonia, Collinsonia canadensis, for the congested pelvis and the singer's throat; Gelsemium, Gelsemium sempervirens, for the flushed, restless fever, are Eclectic remedies with Eclectic indications, and the indications are the part that lasts.
What survives
The school is gone; the method and the books remain. Felter, Ellingwood, and King and Lloyd are reprinted and are read as working texts by American herbalists, and the specific indications, plant matched to sign rather than to diagnosis, are the working method of David Winston, Paul Bergner, and Matthew Wood, who joins them to the physiomedical tissue states. Michael Moore's Southwest School of Botanical Medicine and Henriette Kress's herbal site put the texts online, which is how most practitioners now read them. Specific Medicines themselves are no longer made, and the modern tinctures at 1:2 and 1:5 stand in for them at larger doses. The Eclectic demand for wild roots is also the reason Goldenseal and American Ginseng, Panax quinquefolius, are at-risk plants today, and why the wild Echinacea of the prairie is not harvested; United Plant Savers keeps the list, and the cultivated root is the one used.