Sectarianism

“Only in 1806, when Samuel Thomson began to market ‘family rights’ to his botanical system of domestic practice (patented in 1813), were some Americans recruited to a true medical sect. During the 1820s and 1830s Thomsonianism’s following and strength grew markedly. Eclecticism – a parallel system of botanical healing in which professional medical practitioners supplanted the self-help care of the early Thomsonian plan – began to flourish in the 1840s and 1850s. During the same two decades homeopathy, first introduced to America in the mid-1820s, became the country’s most prominent medical sect. Hydropathy, or the water cure, the other major sect to emerge during the antebellum period, became well entrenched from the late 1840s . . . What all sectarians did share was the proclaimed objective of overturning medical orthodoxy. It was their common goal of destroying the established medical order that gave them definition as a group.” (Warner III, 236, 237).