THE HISTORY OF HERBAL MEDICINE IN NORTH AMERICA (Part Ten)

November 28, 2003

http://www.redflagsweekly.com/caldecott/2003_nov23.html

THE HISTORY OF HERBAL MEDICINE IN NORTH AMERICA

(Part Ten)

By RFD Columnist, Todd Caldecott

of Clinical Herbal Studies

Wild Rose College Of Natural Healing

Calgary, Alberta

Email: phyto

Website

In this major series, RFD Columnist, Todd Caldecott explores the history of

herbal medicine in North America, with the view of fostering a better

understanding of the issues that face modern herbalists and a greater

appreciation of the evolution of the relationships between alternative,

complimentary and conventional medicine.

Herbal medicine in North America has a long and venerable tradition, from the

First Nations practices that were in existence thousands of years before the

first colonists arrived, to the development of four-year clinical programs at

the turn of the last century.

The end of an era

With Scudder firmly at the helm of the Eclectic movement, scores of training

institutes and Eclectic medical societies opened up across the United States and

abroad, although Scudder was, at least initially, both skeptical and cautious of

these new developments. Scudder was afraid that this burgeoning interest would

dilute Eclectic training, as he felt that there weren’t enough properly trained

practitioners to fulfill the demand. The cause of Eclectic medicine however was

far from secure, and by the late 1890’s Regular physicians still outnumbered

Eclectics by a factor of seven. At about this time the American Medical

Association (A.M.A.) was formed, and proved to be a powerful lobby for Regular

medicine, even grand fathering some Eclectic and Homeopathic physicians into the

fold. In the face of this bold move by the Regulars, the majority of Eclectic,

Homeopaths, and Physiomedicalist practitioners continued to argue amongst

themselves, oblivious to what would prove to be their real

enemy.

Part of the function of the A.M.A. was to protect the interests of Regular

medicine, while at the same time discrediting other medical approaches such as

homeopathy and Eclectic medicine. Ever since Dr. French went after Thomson in

1809, the practitioners of Regular medicine had steadily lost ground to the

medical reformists, struggling for a way to regain control of their monopoly.

Their answer came in 1910, with the publication of the Flexner Report.

Funded initially by the Carnegie Foundation, Flexner was asked to do a major

study of all the medical schools in the United States and Canada. In the

succeeding eighteen months Flexner visited each of the 155 medical colleges in

both countries and attempted to grade them. Flexner was appalled with what he

found, finding most of the schools lacking in what he thought were the most

basic requirements. The one “bright spot” however was Johns Hopkins, which also

happened to be his alma mater. His recommendations were straightforward:

schools should be modeled after John Hopkins. Those schools that had potential

should be provided with additional funding, and those that didn’t, according to

Flexner’s rather subjective criteria, ought to be extinguished.

When Flexner’s report hit the media it created an uproar, and its effect was to

undermine public confidence in medical education, resulting in the eventual

closure of almost half of the existing medical schools in the U.S. and Canada.

Concurrently, the AMA lobbied hard for changes to the medical curriculum, and

those schools that didn’t accept the new tenets of biomedicine were denied state

funding. This included all of the Eclectic, Physiomedical and Homeopathic

schools, which only 50 years before were enthusiastically supported by

government, if for no other reason than these systems of healing were highly

effective. In this environment, Regular medicine flourished, perhaps no less so

than John Hopkins University, which received an endowment of $1.5 million from

the Rockefeller foundation shortly after the publication of Flexner’s report.

Flexner’s obvious bias towards Regular medicine, which at that time was

undergoing a kind of revitalization by research into synthetic drugs, fit nicely

with the modus operandi of John D. Rockefeller. At that time, Rockefeller had

the world market in oil products pretty much monopolized, and his Standard Oil

Company was a natural to supply the crude petroleum needed to manufacture the

chemical drugs religiously embraced by a new generation of Regular physicians.

The Rockefeller group would also later become financially involved with several

major drug companies, thereby directly profiting from the new medicine it

supported and helped create. The amount of money tossed around by the

Rockefeller Foundation to support this new evolution of Regular medicine is hard

to imagine. At a time when people were earning between four and five dollars per

week, the Rockefellers gave away millions in “philanthropy,” much of it targeted

to support the dominance of “modern medicine.”

After the Flexner Report, the once defiant and now highly sophisticated systems

of healing that had risen in opposition to 200 years of bloodletting and mercury

were in tatters. Political agendas, media sensationalism, and intense scrutiny

turned the grassroots against these medical heretics. Deprived of state funding

and struggling to get by on tuition fees, the last of physiomedical colleges in

Chicago were closed down by 1909, and while continuing the struggle for a few

more years, the Eclectic Medical College of Cincinnati closed its doors in 1939.

For more than three hundred years herbal medicine played a pre-eminent role in

health care delivery in North America. Initially this was out of practicality:

colonists had few resources, and were grateful for the little bit of First

Nations medicine they had learned, supplemented with old-fashion “Grandma”

herbal medicine the colonists wives brought with them. As the colonies expanded

however, an increasingly allopathic approach to medicine began to dominate,

especially in the burgeoning cities. With the Enlightenment of Alexander Pope

and the Age of Reason, scientific adventurers found new vistas in inorganic

chemistry and biology. Many of their discoveries would shake the foundation of

the way people looked at the world, and hence, an increasingly cynical view of

the old humoral theories of Graeco-Roman medicine. In rejecting Galen and

Hippocrates however, the struggling new medicine would find itself without much

in the way of treatment options, and perhaps inevitably, it

continued to rely on basic Graeco-Roman approaches to disease. Mercurial

compounds borrowed from the Arabs, used with some success in syphilis,

increasingly filled the void left by a vegetable-based pharmacopoeia, discarded

along with the other “useless” learning of the ancients. And despite the early

advances in anatomy and William Harvey’s accurate concept of a circulatory

system, medicine expanded the use of blood-letting, seemingly oblivious to the

very real empirical evidence that should have limited such techniques. The

pinnacle of this was Professor Benjamin Rush, M.D., who proclaimed in defiant

response to the time-Hippocratic maxim vis medicatrix naturae, that nature was

nothing more than a “squalling cat.”

In the face of such medical arrogance, grassroots opposition rose up in likes of

Samuel Thomson. His approach based entirely on empirical observation, Thomson

experimented with and organized an increasingly diverse pharmacopoeia based on

herbal medicines. Although he found it difficult to sustain his family on the

meager income generated by his early attempts at herbal doctoring, and despite

the vicious attacks of the medical profession, Thomson persevered, and reaped

the reward of the widespread sale of his patent. Thomson’s system was

enthusiastically embraced by a desperate populace, poisoned and exhausted from

the years of calomel purges and unnecessary blood-letting. This interest soon

manifested itself in a desire by some of the more intellectual supporters of

Thomson to see his system administered by college-trained botanic physicians.

Thomson however was vehemently opposed to any such training, and along with his

increasingly victimized attitude, fostered a schism within the

botanico-medical movement: those that preferred that Thomson’s system remain a

kind of informal, grassroots approach to healing, and those that advocated

academic training. Despite his opposition, Thomsonian-style medical colleges

soon popped up all over North America, most notably Alva Curtis’

Botanico-Medical Institute in Cincinnati, and later, Cook’s Physiomedical

Institute. Early on in the cause of medical reform, Thomson was joined by Dr.

Wooster Beach and his students, and although both were galvanized in their

opposition to Regular medicine, their progeny persisted in arguing and fighting

amongst themselves. In the end, this more or less constant infighting allowed

Regular medicine to fortify political opinion against these medical heretics,

and by the turn of the century, the cause of medical reform seems to have been

run off the rails.

Despite its relatively short history, the systems of healing that rose up in

opposition to Regular medicine represent an important source of knowledge for

modern clinical herbalists. Freed from the shackles of humoral medicine, these

practitioners based their practices on nothing more than empirical observation,

and in so doing, developed a system of practice, including diagnostic and

assessment techniques, that are the basis of modern clinical herbal medicine.

Although sometimes cloaked in the obtuse and quaint prose of the 18th and 19th

centuries, the works of Thomson, Culbreth, Cooke, Beach, Scudder, King, Lloyd

and Jones are prerequisite reading to those that wish to evolve their healing

art to a high level of practice.

We know, of course, that herbal medicine survived the Flexner Report, as it will

likely continue to survive as it has since time immemorial. As my colleague

Terry Willard likes to say, “the Earth grows herbalists.” This weedy nature of

the herbalist species has continued to persist beyond the apparent dominance of

biomedicine, reflected in the 20th century works of Priest and Priest (Herbal

Medication), Jethro Kloss (Back to Eden), and John Christopher (School of

Natural Healing). Despite being ignored by modern medicine for almost 75 years,

herbal medicine is again making inroads into the practice of medicine, not only

as an alternative, but also as a complement. In the short term however, herbal

medicine will likely remain, in North America at least, a “back-woods”

profession. But rather than being a derogatory statement, herbalists should

probably embrace such descriptions, because it is in the forest and fields,

amongst the wild plants, that they draw their strength...in the

power of the earth.

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THE HISTORY OF HERBAL MEDICINE IN NORTH AMERICA (Part Ten)

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