Marketplace of the Marvelous (5 page)

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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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