Talk:Eclectic medicine

trouble
This article is an awful mess.--Filll 20:35, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

This article is really a stub on an historical subject. Obviously needs more information. I put the stub marker on it. KSVaughan2 13:06, 22 August 2007 (UTC)


 * The information I have found in the references is contradictory. The article does not agree with all the information in the references. It is disjoint and I have found that it is hard to find material on the internet to fill in the gaps, at least so far--Filll 13:12, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Would you please be more specific so that the references can be improved? I have changed quite a bit of it and removed the cleanup, but anything you find that would improve it would be useful. It still qualifies as a stub though because it needs more work KSVaughan2 15:22, 22 August 2007 (UTC)


 * I will hopefully be checking this very carefully and calling in more editors to help in the coming days and weeks. Hopefully eventually we can turn this into a well-referenced, coherent account.--Filll 15:25, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

What was the eventual fate of eclectic medicine? Did it influence mainstream Western medicine as it is practiced today (without bloodletting or mercury, for example), or was it basically marginalized? Audiosqueegee (talk) 19:16, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

Two different medical systems: Understand the differences
The essence of the conflict between Eclectic/herbalism, and modern medicine (such as it is) is given in this single sentence, which I extracted from the main article:

It [Eclectic medicine] represented the last attempt to stem the tide of standard practice medicine. This was the antithesis of the model of the rural primary care vitalist physician who was the basis for Eclectic practice.

"Standard practice" is city medicine, learned from books and applied willy-nilly. As far back as I can trace (Joseph Blagrave, Astrological Practice of Physick, 1671; Richard Saunders, Astrological Judgment and Practice of Physick, 1677), herbalists were rural and successful, whereas drugs and patent medicines were of the city and largely failures. The difference isn't rocket science. In the country there is an abundance of animals and plants, with their complex interactions on full display. People who live there know how life works and will know, almost by instinct, what to do when things go wrong. In the city there are an abundance of people who think food comes from factories. City people know nothing about life, never have and never will. What little city people do know is from hearsay and rumor. The fact that rural medical books are again in print, whereas comparable city books of the same era are not (and never will be), is an indication.

In the contest between urban and rural, rural eventually lost. Not because rural was worse, but because rural was not organized, rural was oral and traditional, rural lacked population density and rural was poor. The city won because the cities were organized, literate, densely populated and wealthy. Relative merit of rural vs: city had nothing to do with it.

So far as actual results are concerned, city medicine - the only sort we now have - is so vastly overpriced and so completely ineffective that people are moving wholesale back to herbalism of one sort or another.

It always pains me to find articles like this on Wiki. They start off so brave but end up with the usual skeptic nonsense. Why? Why is there always carping? Why cannot Wiki draw a line and simply say, We do not understand, maybe some day we will? Dave of Maryland (talk) 14:39, 29 April 2012 (UTC)

Removal of unsourced material
In 1827, a medical tradesman named Wooster Beach, who broke with Thomson as he believed the field needed to become more professional, founded the United States Infirmary in New York, followed in 1829 by the Reformed Medical College in 1829. Both of these would practice and teach "Eclectic Medicine".

Removed the above Reason: broken link - also looks like NRS Edaham (talk) 13:49, 9 May 2017 (UTC)