The Mississippi Valley's great yellow fever epidemic of 1878

Thomson's anti-professionalism and recommended a broader range of botanicals. Beach taught his system to medical students and physicians, and in 1830 some of the latter opened a medical school that moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where it received a state charter as the Eclectic Medical Institute in 1845. Haller suggests that the word "eclectic" was chosen in order to identify the movement with "American common sense and experience" rather than "pathies" like allopathy and homeopathy (p. 92). After a contentious and polymorphous beginning, the Institute became the largest eclectic medical school and "the mecca of eclectic thinking" (p. 216). Its faculty wrote most eclectic textbooks and published the leading eclectic medical journal. More than a dozen degree-granting eclectic medical schools opened during the century. The best provided an acceptable medical education, but most were disreputable or diploma mills. The National Eclectic Medical Association was organized in 1848, became dormant in 1856, and was reactivated in 1870. In the late nineteenth century, eclectic physicians comprised four per cent of the medical profession and practised primarily in the midwest and south. A major problem for eclectic physicians was the harshness of crude botanicals. Beginning in the 1 840s eclectic physicians and pharmaceutical firms tried without success to develop a palatable eclectic pharmacopoeia. Finally in the 1 870s John M Scudder, the Dean of the Eclectic Medical Institute, developed "specific medications," mild and palatable solutions of botanicals designed to treat the symptoms of particular diseases. Specific medications became popular, but eclectics were too diverse to agree on any single set of therapies. Eclectic medical schools lacked the skilled faculty and resources needed to survive the bacteriological revolution and most shut down early in the century. The Eclectic Medical Institute closed in 1939, and the National Eclectic Medical Association in 1965. Haller's account is well written, chronicles the movement's history, and describes eclectic medical schools and some other institutions. It is a significant history of the eclectic movement, but it is not a history of eclectic physicians. It does not examine the types of communities and patients cared for by eclectics or their medical practices, such as their use of non-botanical treatments. Nor does it describe relations between eclectics and regulars and homeopaths. Perhaps others will be sufficiently inspired by Haller's valuable contribution to pursue these issues.