New Guide to Health: Or, Botanic Family Physician, Containing a Complete System of Practice upon a Plan Entirely New …

Samuel Thomson. New Guide to Health: Or, Botanic Family Physician, Containing a Complete System of Practice upon a Plan Entirely New: With a Description of the Vegetables Made Use of, and Directions for Preparing and Administering Them to Cure Disease … 9th ed. Columbus, Ohio: J. Pike, 1833.

Unlike Benjamin Rush, Samuel Thomson was not a trained physician, nor did he subscribe to complicated philosophies of medicine. Thomson instead considered himself an herbalist, and he shunned the heroic approach of Rush and the American medical establishment. His ideas, not entirely alien to modern proponents of alternative medicine, encouraged the use of roots and teas to rid the body of toxins and restore balance. His ideas, often inspired by indigenous medicine, quickly gained popularity in the populist era of the 1820s and 30s, especially in rural states like Tennessee.

By the 1840s, Thomson’s ideas began to be formalized in medical education, exemplified by schools like the Botanico-Medical College of Memphis, which was established in 1846. While few of these schools survived the Civil War, by the 20th century these herbal cures had often become indistinguishable from folk medicine.