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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