Ohio History Journal

THOMSONIANISM IN OHIO

 

By FREDERICK C. WAITE, Ph.D.

 

Ohio has long been a battleground. Because of its geograph-

ical position, its terrain, and its internal and bordering waterways,

it was the site of many wars between different Indian nations

before the white man came and also, near the end of the eighteenth

century, the location of the major warfare between the white

men and the Indians.

Because of the geographical position, fertility of the soil and

ownership during the colonial period, it attracted early settlers

from three different cultural areas--Virginia, Pennsyvlania, and

New England. As a result of the mingling of these three different

groups, Ohio, throughout its history as a state, has been a political

battleground. Moreover, in the nineteenth century, since each

of these three groups of early settlers had different predominant

church affiliations, Ohio became the chief battleground of different

sectarian religious groups. Within its borders two important

religious sects, the Disciples and the Mormons, passed their

infancy.

Traceable to the same convergence of different social cul-

tures Ohio has been the major battleground of conflicts between

regular medicine and various medical cults and medical sects. The

center of homeopathy was long in northern Ohio, while the origins

and centers of activity of both eclecticism and the physiomedical

sect were in southern Ohio. For nearly a hundred years Ohio

has been the arena of controversies between regular medicine,

homeopathy, and eclecticism, and the location of sectarian medical

schools.

Except through consideration of the early medical back-

ground, one cannot understand why this contest of medicine oc-

curred in Ohio, nor the reason why a large number of practitioners

and lay adherents of sectarian medicine were resident in this State.

The basic explanation of all this medical contention in Ohio for a

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OHIO MEDICAL HISTORY, 1835-1858          323

 

hundred years lies in the prominent position occupied here by

Thomsonianism from about 1825 until about 1850.

The leader of Thomsonianism was Samuel Thomson. He

was born in southwestern New Hampshire in 1769. He became

a small farmer with the avocation of blacksmith. About 1805

when he was thirty-six years of age he became convinced that

under divine guidance he had a gift for treating the sick. At this

time he could neither read nor write.

His original thesis was the unity of disease and that, there-

fore, all diseases could be cured by a single remedy. His panacea

was lobelia, a powerful emetic. Herein lies the origin of the

theory of specifics which became the keystone of the eclectic

system of practice, the major successor of Thomsonianism.

About 1806 Thomson began to sell for $20 each the rights to

practice his system. He enlarged his medicaments, first adding

Cayenne pepper, and then others, until he had six remedies which

he numbered, but for several years he kept secret their ingredients.

He moved to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, then to a village

near Salem, Massachusetts, and finally about 1818, to Boston.

In 1809 he was indicted and tried at Salem for murder of a

patient who died under his treatment, but he was acquitted be-

cause no intent could be shown. He capitalized the publicity

secured by this trial.

In March, 1813, he was granted a patent on his system of

practice. This was replaced by another patent in 1823 which

would run fourteen years. Just before its expiration it was re-

newed for another fourteen years. This patent in 1813 is the

first patent of a medicine in the United States and the mother of

a host of offspring for more than a century.

With the aid of Elias Smith, a Universalist preacher in

Boston, he produced his book entitled A Narrative of the Life and

Medical Discoveries of Samuel Thomson, Containing an Account

of His System of Practice, etc. The first edition, containing 180

pages, was printed in Boston in 1822. It contained what he called

a diploma, an engraved page giving to the purchaser the right to

practice the system. Each purchaser was required to agree not

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324   OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

to lend the book nor reveal any of its contents except to other

purchasers. The price was $20.00 and the purchaser, ipso facto,

became a member of the Friendly Botanic Society. In later edi-

tions the phraseology of the title was somewhat changed.

This book ran through thirteen editions. The fourth edition

was a translation into German, published at Lancaster, Ohio, in

1828. According to Thomson, the total sales exceeded 1OO,OOO

copies. At least four editions were printed in Ohio. Following

the publication of this book the growth of the cult was rapid.

Although Thomson himself called it Botanic Medicine, the desig-

nation of Thomsonianism soon superseded the original name. The

cult spread all over New England and into New York. This was

just the period of increased migration into Ohio of settlers from

this same area, and they brought Thomsonianism into northern

Ohio about 1825.

In 1821 Thomson's son Cyrus made a trip to Ohio to spread

the cult. In the summer of 1825 Charles Miles was appointed a

general agent and located at Columbus. In a year and a half

he sold five hundred rights to practice. In January, 1827, Horton

Howard came into control of the western headquarters at Colum-

bus. He sold four thousand rights in Ohio and neighboring states

in three and a half years.

The cult spread from New York southward and there were

many centers of adherents in New Jersey, in eastern Pennsylvania,

in Maryland, in central Virginia, and in central Georgia.

In 1827 a schism among the Thomsonians was led by Wooster

Beach of New York City. Beach called his faction the Reformed

Botanics. One of the points of difference was the question of

establishing botanical medical schools to train men in the cult.

Thomson opposed this, for, being himself uneducated, he con-

sistently said that education was a deterrent in the practice of

the cult and that ignorance was an asset since the ignorant indi-

vidual had a more open mind.

Wooster Beach tried to establish in New York City what he

called the Reformed Medical College, but the state authorities

refused to grant the charter and he could give no degrees. The

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OHIO MEDICAL HISTORY, ₁8₃₅-1858         325

 

diploma of this school was an elaborate certificate of membership

in the Reformed Medical Society, but this failed to satisfy those

who wanted a medical degree. Therefore this educational effort

was transferred to Ohio where the college began operation in

1830 at Worthington, in the buildings and under the dormant char-

ter of Worthington College, which institution had been abandoned

and established elsewhere under a new charter as Kenyon College.

In 1832 Horton Howard of Columbus deserted Thomson

and established another rival faction called the Improved Botanics.

One of the most important individuals in the early develop-

ment of Thomsonianism in Ohio was Alva Curtis (1797-1880).

He was born in New Hampshire and graduated from an academy

in that state, not from a college as has been erroneously stated.

Like many New Englanders he went south about 1825 and be-

came a teacher in a girls' school in Richmond where he continued

successfully for several years. When William Lloyd Garrison in

1831 proclaimed his theory of immediate emancipation, Alva

Curtis supported the doctrine. This terminated his availability

as a teacher in Richmond and he was dismissed from his teaching

position. He had been converted to Thomsonianism about 1830,

and he now attempted to practice that medical cult in Richmond,

but his known adherence to abolition made him unacceptable.

He found it necessary to move to a northern state, and since

Ohio was in a period of rapid growth, he chose Columbus, where

he settled in 1834. Here he took over the editorship of the Thom-

sonian Recorder, the most prominent journal of the cult.

Alva Curtis was far above the average Thomsonian in both

education and ability. Soon after he arrived in Columbus he

established a school to teach Thomsonianism, and as he was an

experienced teacher he attracted students. The school had no

charter at first, so could grant no degrees, but degrees were quite

unnecessary then, for anyone, if he could find patients, could prac-

tice medicine without any legal certification as to medical or other

education.

In 1839 Alva Curtis secured a charter for the Literary and

Botanico-Medical Institute of Ohio. It was conducted for two

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326   OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

years in Columbus, but moved to Cincinnati in 1841. This was

the first chartered Thomsonian school as distinguished from the

Reformed Botanics; thus Ohio had the first chartered schools of

each faction.

Since 1825 Columbus had been the western outpost of pure

Thomsonianism, while near at hand, at Worthington, was the

center of the Reformed Botanics, and one of Samuel Thomson's

three sons settled in Portage County. Thus the Western Reserve

came to have a large number of Thomsonian adherents.

Ohio was prominent in Thomsonian publications--books, as

well as journals. Of the thirteen editions of Thomson's book at

least four were printed in Ohio. One of these, a German edition

for the Pennsylvania Germans resident in the east central part of

the State, was the only translation into a foreign language. Also

at Columbus in 1829 and at Cincinnati in 1830 were published

Samuel Robinson's Lectures on Medical Botany which became

second only to Thomson's work for text-book use.

The period of the greatest growth of Thomsonianism was

from 1822 to 1837. By 1835 the popularity of the cult began

to wane in New England and New York, and many practitioners

were among the large numbers of people who were then moving

westward to increase the settlements in Ohio and the states im-

mediately west.

The cholera epidemics of 1832 and 1834 accelerated the ac-

ceptance of Thomsonianism by the people of this region. The

regular profession acknowledged their helplessness against the

disease, but the Thomsonians proclaimed that they had cured

every case of cholera they had treated and numerous specific in-

stances were cited and supported by testimonials and affidavits

of the patients. A check of the location of these patients shows,

however, that the great majority were in towns where there is

no reliable record that cholera actually occurred.

These "cures" resulted from a favorite method of all cultists,

that is, diagnosis of a mild disease under the name of a severe

disease. Every case of ordinary summer diarrhea was diagnosed

by the Thomsonians as cholera, and their treatment cured these

patients, or the patients recovered in spite of the treatment.

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OHIO MEDICAL HISTORY, 1835-1858         327

 

However, the people accepted the claims and there was a

great increase in the number of those who relied upon the Thom-

sonian method of treatment. In 1835 the governor of Mississippi

stated publicly that one-half the people of that state relied upon

Thomsonianism. In the same year, in Ohio, the Thomsonians

claimed the adherence of one-half the population and the regular

profession acknowledged that one-third of the people were ad-

herents of the cult. Ohio was then the third state in the Union

in size of population, and therefore became the most extensive

field for the Thomsonians in the country. In 1839 Thomson

claimed three million adherents in the United States.

The technique of the Thomsonians was to inveigh against

regular medical practice, especially the use of mercury, poly-

pharmacy, and blood-letting. But the Thomsonians outdid the

regular physicians in the matter of compounds, some of their

thirty ingredients including inert and superstitious ones. As for

blood-letting, three days of continuous emesis, enemas, and steam

baths were far more depleting than drawing four ounces of blood

--the usual maximum in phlebotomy.

The Thomsonians called the regular physicians mineral doc-

tors, and the regular physicians retorted by designating the Thom-

sonians as steam doctors and (referring to emesis) "puke doctors."

One of the prominent activities of Samuel Thomson was the

manufacture of the medicaments that he advocated, especially of

numbers one to six. While he abandoned his early complete

secrecy as to the ingredients of his remedies, the directions that

he gave in his book for preparing them were very general and he

warned his followers that the only efficacious and reliable prepa-

rations were those made by the several manufacturing concerns

which he either owned or controlled.

The growth of the cult in the Middle West resulted in the

largest of these manufacturing concerns being in Cincinnati. From

it, all the territory tributary to the Mississippi and Ohio rivers

was supplied. Thus, Ohio came to have the largest number of ad-

herents in any one state, the center of its publications--both books

and journals--and the location of its principal manufacturing

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328   OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

concern. The direction of the activities by Samuel Thomson and

his three sons was a prosperous business and from this fact de-

veloped opposition to Thomson and his lieutenants. Three of

these lieutenants were Alva Curtis and Thomas Hersey of Co-

lumbus, and Samuel Robinson of Cincinnati.

Moreover, in spite of the opposition of Samuel Thomson,

several botanic medical schools had been established in Georgia,

Virginia, Tennessee, and Massachusetts, and the graduates of

these schools knew more about medicine than did the members of

the controlling hierarchy. They began to protest against some of

Thomson's dogmas, supporting the Reformed Botanics' attitude.

The controversy within the cult began to be prominent in 1837

when the patent was about to expire, and the decline began. Of

the several rebels against Thomson, Wooster Beach was the first,

but the most prominent in Ohio were Horton Howard and Alva

Curtis of Columbus. Howard died of cholera in 1834 and his

faction soon disappeared.

Samuel Thomson died in Boston in 1843 and his sons could

not hold the cult together. Like the wonderful one-horse shay,

"it went to pieces all at once and nothing first, just as bubbles

do when they burst."

A considerable proportion of the remnants gathered around

three foci known as the Eclectics, the Physiomedicals, and the

True Thomsonians. The latter group, finding that the name of

Samuel Thomson was no longer a lode-stone soon changed their

designation to the Botanics. Their better members deserted to one

of the other factions and the Botanics rapidly disappeared, there

being very few left after the Civil War. Each of the three fac-

tions established a medical school in Cincinnati, although the

Botanico-Medical College was really a transfer of the school of

Alva Curtis from Columbus, and the Eclectic Medical Institute

was a revival of the Reformed Botanic College of Worthington,

dormant for five years. Alva Curtis soon deserted the Botanics

and became the leader of Physiomedicalism.

The Eclectic and Physiomedical schools were the parents of

all other schools of these sects in the United States, and thus Ohio

became the parent of both of these medical sects.

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OHIO MEDICAL HISTORY, 18₃₅-1₁85           329

 

The Physiomedical sect became moribund with the death of

Alva Curtis in 1880. The Eclectics lasted the longest, its last

school closing only a few years ago, so there are still several hun-

dred graduates of eclectic medical schools in practice in the United

States.

When the dissolution of Thomsoniansm came in 1843 the

Eclectic faction attracted the more able and better educated men,

including the Reformed Botanics; the Physiomedicals were next

best, and the Botanics the least competent. However, these three

factions do not account for all the former Thomsonians. What

became of the rest?

A few went into regular medicine. In the records of regular

medical schools of that period are occasional requests for the

conventional year of credit for having been a practitioner, with

refusal of that request because the applicant had practiced Thom-

soniansm.

A very considerable number went over to the water curists.

This accounts for the fact that the original European thesis, of

use by this cult of only cold water, was modified in America by

addition of hot water and steam. There was a further modifica-

tion of this therapy by the absorption of many Grahamites, the

vegetarian cult of that period.

The therapy of the water cure was difficult to carry out in

the home. Moreover, their special desire was to treat chronic

rather than acute illness. Therefore there came the founding of a

large number of institutions known as water cure establishments.

There were several in Ohio. These mostly disappeared by about

1880, but a few still exist in changed attire under the name of

sanitaria. The best known is the one at Battle Creek, Michigan,

which was originally a water cure establishment. Here you will

find a faint remnant of Thomsonian cultism in the use of enemas,

now called colon irrigations, and also a very distinct retention,

as a part of the institutional therapy, of the therapy of the Gra-

hamite cult of a hundred years ago in the insistance upon an en-

tirely vegetarian diet.

However, another goal attracted many former Thomsonians.

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330    OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

It will take more argument than room here permits to convince

American homeopathists and their historians that the major rea-

son for the sudden growth of Homeopathy between 1840 and 1855

was the collapse of Thomsonianism, but a considerable amount

of investigation, yielding several different kinds of data, all points

to the conclusion that large numbers of Thomsonians went over

to the more novel Homeopathy.

One would not expect it to be difficult for an individual who

had depended for his entire knowledge of how to practice upon

a single book by Samuel Thomson to shift his allegiance to an-

other single book by another Samuel, the Organon of Samuel

Hahnemann.

I have time to mention but one of the lines of evidence.

Thomsonianism was strongly entrenched in certain areas from

1830 to 1840. These were eastern Massachusetts, southern Ver-

mont, the eastern part of the Mohawk Valley in New York, eastern

Pennsylvania, northern, central, and southwestern Ohio, and

southern Michigan. It was in exactly these areas and in no others,

that Homeopathy had its early growth and developed most before

the Civil War. One might contend this was due to a series of

coincidences, but when several other lines of evidence are added

I am convinced that Homeopathy arose out of the remnants of

Thomsonianism and received far more accretion from this source

than from desertion from regular medicine to this new doctrine of

similia similibus curentur and infinitesimal doses.

Thomsonianism was the second medical cult that arose in the

United States. It was preceded by about fifteen years by Perkin-

ism which, because of the early death of its founder, was short-

lived. However, for a few years Perkinism created quite a stir in

England, while Thomsonianism never crossed the ocean. Samuel

Thomson for a time put into his practice elements of Perkinism,

using what he called an electrical machine for external treatment.

Among educated men Thomsonianism had few adherents or

supporters. Benjamin Waterhouse, professor of medicine at

Harvard, stated that it might possibly be worth investigating to

see if there were any minor elements of truth in its claims. So

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OHIO MEDICAL HISTORY, 1835-1858          331

hungry was Thomson for even a nod of recognition from anyone

in high places that thereafter he reiterated that Waterhouse was

an ardent supporter. A similar result followed a polite non-com-

mittal personal compliment to Samuel Thomson by Samuel L.

Mitchell of New York, and a comment by Constantine Rafinesque,

the French naturalist and professor of materia medica in Transyl-

vania University.

Thomsonianism, by Thomson's own claims, was a medical

system of and for the ignorant. Nevertheless, it had the largest

following of any American medical cult and holds an important

place in the history of American medicine because out of it came

one of the medical sects (Eclecticism) that persisted for nearly a

century, and another sect (Homeopathy) at its outset received

major accruals at the disintegration of Thomsonianism.

This cult is more important in the medical history of Ohio

than in that of any other state, both because it was stronger in

Ohio than elsewhere, and also that its disintegration came just

at the time to furnish the foundation of the three most prominent

medical sects in Ohio, namely, Eclecticism, Physiomedicalism, and

Homeopathy.

Its great acceptance in Ohio arose from the fact that when

Thomsonianism was at its peak the population was growing more

rapidly than the regular profession and therefore, with lack of

adequate medical service, Thomsonianism was tolerated as better

than nothing.

The important place of this cult in the medical history of

this State makes it highly desirable that someone should give it

extensive study. There is much material. No writer has given

it any extensive critical historical attention.

This short sketch makes no claim to being a history of this

feature of Ohio's medical history, but it is hoped it may lead

someone to investigate it thoroughly and make a detailed record

of the events that characterize it and the results that have come

from it.

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