Marketplace of the Marvelous (6 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.'”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.