Almost from the moment that European explorers set foot upon the New World descriptions of the flora and fauna were cast in idyllic images of paradisaical wonder: terra incognita transformed into terra miraculosa.1 Early accounts suggested that much of the North American flora held special medicinal virtues, and physicians like Nicholas Monardes tried to promote this Edenic wilderness as nature's apothecary.2 But as Great Britain solidified its hold upon the New World, its Old World culture became a more significant feature of colonial life. This was no less true of its medicine. The common folk generally practiced the healing arts with the confidence instilled by some popular medical guide like any one of several editions of Nicholas Culpeper's herbal.3 In David Cowen's words, "the book is noteworthy as a giant step by which a homely version of classical medicine crossed the Atlantic."4 Published in Boston in 1720, it is no wonder that Culpeper's popular but unofficial translation of the Pharmacopoeia Londinensis, or The London Dispensatory was the first complete medical book to issue from a North American press.5 Likewise, colonial physicians were tied to the familiar materia medica they had known in England. Mineral agents like mercury and antimony as well as vegetable products common to European practice such as belladonna, asafetida, and henbane formed prominent articles in every regular physician's armamentarium.

Thus by the time of independence two healing traditions had been imported from Europe: one comprising home remedies drawn from popular culture, another developed out of professional practice. But the new American republic, based upon the democratizing influences of the Enlightenment, awakened a special confidence in the people. Recently liberated from the Old World bondage of titled privilege, Americans looked away from Europe and toward the hinterland for answers to their own social, political, and economic future. As egalitarian freedoms and native intelligence were wrought from a pristine wilderness, medicine was imbued with this new spirit as well. If America's frontier was filled with such bounty, surely it must hold wondrous cures for the scourges of man and it must certainly be possible for every man to know those remedies so freely bestowed by God and nature.

Such notions clashed with those of the medical elite. Formal training in the academy, an extensive and complicated nosology, and long-established medicinal agents given in even more complicated combinations dictated professional practice; anything less was challenged as quackery. Although both popular and professional healing traditions had been transplanted from Europe to the New World, the former became especially alluring to a nation engaged in a democratic experiment of epic proportions. Jacksonian democratic ideals added to the recently successful revolution, largely unsettled frontier, and long-established tradition of folk healing produced a volatile mix ready to explode against a medical establishment identified as distinctly Old World and English. For regular practitioners, there was trouble in paradise.

No individual gave greater expression to these conditions than Samuel Thomson. Thomson had long been influenced by the folk healing practices of his native New Hampshire. He began to question the wisdom and authority of regular physicians at an early age, and in 1790-91 three major events occurred which established his future course as an outspoken opponent of regular medicine. In March of 1790 his mother developed a serious case of measles. The regular physicians attending her applied a variety of useless and tortuous remedies that probably hastened her death on May 13. At the same time, however, Thomson claimed to have cured the same disease in himself with an assortment of vegetable syrups which relieved his cough and restored his health. The third and final episode confirming his faith in botanical medicine was the near-death of his young wife in July of 1791. Following a difficult delivery, seven physicians seemed unable to restore her to health. Calling in two "root doctors," Thomson witnessed Susan's dramatic recovery. From that point forward Thomson proclaimed, "My mind was bent on learning the medical properties of such vegetables as I met with . . . ."6 Thomson eventually developed his own ideas of the healing arts into a botanic system of medicine explained in his New Guide to Health, or Botanic Family Physician. Thomson sent out his own designated agents who sold his book of numbered botanical remedies across the land and provided instruction in Thomsonian medicine. Besides offering the promise that his system was all that was needed for health and longevity, Thomson also attacked regular physicians with impunity. He charged them with being elitist remnants of an Old World order, one that was ill-suited to the demands of a new egalitarian republic. For Thomson the regulars were more interested in extracting fees from their patients than in promoting health; theirs was a practice substituting credentials for real knowledge.

The rise of Jacksonian democracy with the increasing political power of the trans-Mississippi West made for an especially receptive audience. Notions that every man could be his own physician resonated with a citizenry who in 1829 elected Andrew Jackson as president, a Tennessee war hero who with little difficulty had promoted himself as the homespun man of the people. Jacksonian principles were of a very different order from those of Jefferson, a man who had also spoken loudly for democratic ideals. In the words of John William Ward, Jefferson called for "the precedence of intellect over birth, not that intelligence was inevitably characteristic of man."7 But this was precisely what the Jacksonians were claiming. Indeed learning represented a corruption of wisdom or native intelligence in this egalitarian age. "The corruption of wisdom by learning, of Reason by Understanding," continues Ward, "[was] . . . here linked to the material advance of society, the movement away from nature. In national terms the problem could then be phrased as the simple West versus the effete East; in a wider frame of reference, as the United States versus Europe."8 Nothing epitomized Old World learning more than the regular medical profession, and so Thomson's attack on the formal medical training and heroic practices of the regulars found an attentive and receptive audience. By the 1830s it was generally acknowledged that at least one million Americans were practicing Thomsonian medicine, many coming from beyond the established northeast to the new western states like Ohio, Tennessee, Indiana, and Mississippi. In the 1840s Thomsonians left Council Bluffs, Iowa, with the Mormons heading for Utah.9 When the Thomsonians began calling for the elimination of state licensing for practitioners, state after state naturally heeded the call and democratized the medical profession by failing to enforce existing statutes, removing penalties for their violations, or outright repeal.

But Thomson sowed the seeds of his own demise. Thomson rejected any attempt at creating schools in which to train the Thomsonian faithful. Without any credentialing mechanism, agents were difficult to control and many unauthorized botanics sold pirated copies of Thomson's New Guide to Health. Fostered by a suspicious nature that bordered on paranoia and by a seemingly unbridled contentiousness, Samuel Thomson was unable to maintain control of his own system.

If Thomson was his own worst enemy, the spirit of the age was also running against such a freewheeling system of grass roots therapeutics. Just as egalitarian democracy helped to spread Thomsonian doctrines, its demise spelled the end of a botanic cult with little formal structure and few credentialing mechanisms. What John William Ward has said of Jacksonian democracy rings equally true of Thomsonian medicine: "[It]

. . . was oriented toward a period in American social development that was slipping away at the very moment of its formulation."10

In 1838 Alva Curtis split from Thomson and created his own Independent Thomsonian Medical Society. Like Thomson, these independents rejected the heroic bleeding and purging therapeutics of the allopaths. Unlike their predecessor, however, these botanics called for the immediate establishment of colleges ready to train its cadre of sectarians who would soon be dubbed physio-medical or physio-pathic practitioners.11

But Thomson and his progeny were not the only botanics on the scene. One of the most important of these sectarian groups was the eclectics.12 Started by Wooster Beach under the name Reformed medicine, this group rejected adherence to any preconceived theory of therapeutics. Instead they claimed, as their name would imply, to choose methods from any medical group. This empirical system presumably left them open to any and all schools of practice. In reality, however, their armamentarium comprised botanicals primarily indigenous to North America and their canon was grounded in a rejection of the use of harsh minerals and opposition to anything that smacked of efforts by allopaths to assert their privilege or preeminence to medical authority. Under the able administration of Beach's apostle Thomas Vaughan Morrow, eclecticism spread from its original home in New York to Ohio, where the establishment of the Eclectic Medical Institute (EMI) in 1845 made Cincinnati the "Mecca" of eclecticism for nearly one hundred years. Supported by a comparatively large and competent faculty, the EMI prospered, spreading its adherents throughout the Midwest. By the 1850s the EMI graduated more than one quarter of all Ohio educated physicians in the United States.13

Arrayed with the botanics in their opposition to the heroic bleeding and purging of the regulars were the homeopaths. Their elegant minuscule dose preparations and sophisticated like cures like doctrines appealed to some of America's wealthiest and most influential citizens.14 Homeopathy was founded by German physician Samuel Hahnemann and was imported into New York City by Hans Gram when he began his medical practice there in 1825. Homeopathy flourished and spread. By 1844 the homeopaths of that city, and others like Constantine Hering of Pennsylvania, helped found a national institute. "After its initial period of spectacular growth in the 1840s and 50s," writes Francesco Cordasco, "homeopathy continued to compete with the orthodox profession both in terms of personnel and institutional activity."15

Thus by mid-19th century American medicine had become an arena of professional animosity and therapeutic contention. Far from representing a hegemonic force in health and healing, regular practitioners were being challenged on almost every front -- schools, societies and associations, and theory and practice had become emblematic of one's professional affiliations; all were vying for what historian Alex Berman has called "scientific respectability."16

No where was this more evident than in therapeutics. The deleterious effects of persistent bleeding and massive dosing with toxic minerals like mercury (most commonly in the form of calomel) and antimony (usually prescribed as tartar emetic) became matters around which all sectarians could agree. The Eclectic Medical Journal, official mouthpiece of the EMI, voiced the protests of many when it declared, "Among all the absurd, irrational and fatal means made use of to restore the sick to health, there is none to compare with blood-letting. . . . In sickness we need all the strength and vital forces it is possible to command, and yet blood-letting is resorted to as a rapid method of depletion. Again, it is in violation of every law of physiology, and is never indicated by the natural efforts of the system to throw off disease."17

Although the regulars could argue that the practice of bleeding was in definite decline by mid-19th century, the same could not be claimed for mercury. "Of the poisons, among which the most injurious is mercury," charged eclectic physician G. Price Smith in 1855. "There is scarcely a disease now treated by Allopathic physicians," he added, "in which some preparation of mercury is not given; and what is worse, their text-books sanction this malpractice."18 In contrast, Charles Wilkins Short, faculty member at Transylvania University's allopathic medical school, told his materia medica students that "none others equal in utility, excellence and universal employment the preparations of Mercury and Antimony, for without the aid derived from these giant remedies, our art would be stripped of its main resources."19

William H. Cook, intellectual leader of the physio-medicals, explained in partisan terms the reasons for the regular's preference for mercurous chloride:

Probably no agent, whether of simple remedies or admitted poisons has ever received from the [allopathic] profession such universal and unqualified praise as calomel -- subchloride of mercury. Among many admirable qualities ascribed to it, is that of inducing freer action of the liver, and thus securing a more abundant flow of bile and more regular movements of the bowels. We will admit that calomel favors such results . . . . But when it is claimed and admitted that calomel will induce these very advantageous results, only a part of the truth is stated. The whole truth includes the additional facts, that weariness of the liver always follows its stimulation by calomel; that congestion of it, with chronic enlargement and tenderness, very frequently ensues; and that hardening and abscesses, rather extensive abscesses, and even cancer of this organ, have often been found as ultimate consequences of the exhibition of this article.20

Cook essentially agreed with the diagnosis -- torpid liver or biliousness was the source of most chronic disease. His argument was with the remedy. So physio-medicals as well as eclectics and other sectarians attempted to adjust biliary secretions through the use of alternative cholagogues. Instead of calomel, many botanics prescribed Culver's root (leptandra) and may apple (podophyllum) to do the same thing. In fact, may apple was so frequently used by eclectics where calomel was indicated that it received the dubious distinction of being called "vegetable calomel." Dr. Charles Hempel of the Homeopathic Medical College of Philadelphia recommended chamomile in numerous bilious complaints.21

Both the sectarians and the regulars were proceeding from two fundamental errors. One was diagnostic: The belief that improper liver function caused many diseases. This had a long tradition in medicine, a notion that was in some measure little more than a continuation of Galen's ancient concept of humoral imbalance.22 Dr. James Johnson gave the conventional wisdom of the day in noting, "The liver is the largest gland, or organ of any kind, in the human fabric . . . Now, as the organ exists in almost every class of animals, even where other important viscera are very imperfectly developed, we may fairly conclude, that it answers some great purpose in the animal economy."23

This idea that the liver was the source of many illnesses led to the second fundamental error, which was therapeutic: The notion that an imbalance of biliary secretion was the root of the problem and that this could be manipulated through the administration of calomel or some vegetable substitute.24 After recounting the many afflictions to which biliary imbalances could be ascribed, Johnson spoke for the regulars by declaring, "As an internal medicine, there is none which so steadily increases and meliorates the hepatic secretion as some of the mild preparations of mercury."25

This concept had been tested in animal experiments during the 1850s. The mounting evidence suggested that calomel, in fact, did not have any influence over biliary secretions, and in 1868 the Edinburgh Committee's report published by Dr. J. Hughes Bennett in The British Medical Journal thoroughly refuted this idea. Nonetheless, the medical community's faith in calomel as a valuable cholagogue remained unshaken.26 The persistence of this stubborn adherence to calomel derived from physicians' attachment to tradition and over reliance upon empirical observation. The stools evacuated by a patient dosed with calomel were greenish in color due to the presence of biliverdin. While this alone suggested increased hepatic activity, what the 19th-century physicians did not know was that this greenish color resulted not from more bile production but rather from the antiseptic action of mercury which did not allow the normal conversion of the bile pigment in the bowel due to its violent cathartic action. In short, the intestinal contents were discharged too rapidly for the biliverdin to convert normally into bilirubin.27

Unswervingly faithful to their medical forebears in bestowing the liver with major powers over the human constitution and convinced that their eyes were not deceiving them, regulars remained steadfastly devoted to mercurous chloride as a significant weapon in their armamentarium. The sectarians on the other hand often agreed with the diagnosis only to argue over the specific agents to be employed to achieve the desired result.

Specific lines of therapeutic demarcation between allopaths and sectarians were often distinguished by only one ingredient such as mercury with additional substances blurring into a sea of commonly prescribed plant-based drugs. The standard American pharmaceutical text for the period, Edward Parrish's An Introduction to Practical Pharmacy, recommended a compound cathartic pill made up of 1 grain of calomel augmented by some plant cathartics commonly used by eclectics: 1½ grain of colocynth, 1 grain of jalap or podophyllum (whichever was available), one-fifth grain of gamboge. "Under the name of anti-bilious pills," Parrish declared, "this preparation is vended in great quantities over the country, and by its admirable combination of cathartic properties, is well adapted to supercede as a popular remedy, the numerous nostrums advertised and sold for similar purposes."28

It was within this context that therapeutic matters came to a head during the Civil War. The United States Pharmacopoeia (USP) had since its beginning in 1820 always been predominantly botanical in composition. But the Standard Supply Table of the Union Medical Department was freighted away from botanicals, comprising a mere 41 percent of vegetable substances compared with the 1850 USP's 68 percent and the 1860 USP's 67 percent.29 Prominent among the mineral substances on the Standard Supply Table was antimony as tartar emetic, oxide of antimony, and purified tartar, and mercury in the form of blue mass, mercurial ointment, and most popular of all, calomel.

Despite the long-standing tradition of these agents in the regulars' armamentarium, some members of the allopathic community had already reacted against the abuse of these substances and against heroic therapeutics in general. The medical elite of Massachusetts composed of leading figures like James Jackson, Jacob Bigelow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes placed great faith in nature's ability to heal and became vocal proponents of therapeutic moderation.30

But most practitioners remained steadfast in their use of mercurials and antimony.31 All during the Civil War they remained important articles of allopathic practice and faith. Joseph Janvier Woodward stated that mercury was recommended "in purgative and in small repeated doses" and that "calomel figured prominently in the treatment of dysentery [one of the chief camp illnesses] both in the field and in general hospitals."32 Likewise, Charles S. Tripler and George C. Blackman recommended tartar emetic in treating dysentery, gunshot wounds, and other illnesses and injuries in their Hand-Book for the Military Surgeon.33

Reacting to what he felt was the unbridled use of these substances among his medical corps surgeons, the young and energetic Surgeon General William A. Hammond made a fateful decision to remove calomel and antimony from the Standard Supply Table. In an order that was issued as Circular no. 6 on May 4, 1863, Hammond "struck from the Supply Table" calomel and antimony because of their being "pushed to excess" and concluded that to keep either item available to the medical staff would be "a tacit invitation to its use."34

The response of the sectarians and the regulars was swift. For the botanics, Hammond's order was heralded as a great leap forward for the healing arts. John King of the Eclectic Medical Institute spoke for many irregulars when he declared, "For our part we are glad to see that our old school friends are advancing in the right direction, and feel satisfied that the order of the Surgeon General will hasten the day when mercurials will be entirely discarded in the treatment of disease.35 John King hit an especially sensitive professional nerve when he pointed out, "If the Old School discarded their poisonous minerals entirely, what will be the difference between them and the Eclectics . . . ?"36 King had made an important point and the allopaths knew it. Dr. E. P. Bennett of Danbury, Connecticut, fumed, "If I were an army surgeon, I should consider such an order as a direct impeachment of my capabilities, and offer my resignation at once. Besides, this order is calculated to bring these two important remedies into great disrepute with the public, and give aid and comfort to our enemies, the quacks."37 Calls for Hammond's removal from office soon followed. The committee formed by the American Medical Association to investigate Hammond concluded that Circular no. 6 was "entirely unwarranted" and constituted an "unmerited insult" that "this Association condemns, as unwise and unnecessary."38

Hammond was a bright and ambitious administrative reformer, but many of his actions (needed though they were) incurred the wrath of his colleagues. In addition, Hammond had mounting disagreements with his superior, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. Thus by 1864 Hammond had lost valuable support both within the Union medical corps and on Lincoln's cabinet. The issuance of Circular no. 6 represented nothing short of professional treason. For most of his allopathic colleagues this was the last straw.

On January 17, 1864, Hammond was arrested to face court martial on a variety of flimsy and baseless charges.39 By summer, a weak and compliant review board found him guilty and Hammond bid a reluctant farewell to the medical corps on August 22, 1864. Hammond would eventually be completely exonerated and reinstated with full rank as Brigadier General (retired) after a Senate Military Committee review in 1878. But the damage had been done. "The old-guard's victory had long-lasting effects," writes historian George Worthington Adams. "As the older men began to get the important posts the best young men tended to leave the service. There was an end of new ideas, and after 1865 a partial relapse into ante-bellum lethargy."40

The calomel controversy during the Civil War was the climax to allopathic/ sectarian contentions during the 19th-century. The regulars always possessed the power and political influence necessary to limit the impact of the sectarians, but curiously enough the major casualty of the war was one of their own: William A. Hammond. Hammond had seriously miscalculated the lengths to which allopaths would defend their therapeutic faith, especially when they represented agents which so clearly defined their professional practice. It cost him his job, and it cost the Union Medical Department and able and progressive administration.

The court martial of Surgeon General Hammond demonstrates the stridency of therapeutic contention during the 19th century. By 1864 the allopaths had clearly won the day. Their continued use and abuse mercurial agents would persist into the 20th century.41 Botanics, using an increasing array of vegetable products to stimulate and modify liver activity, were no better.42 Broad and sweeping therapeutic reform would not occur until the etiology of disease and modern pharmacological principles provided a firm basis upon which a modern medical profession could stand. Until men like Paul Ehrlich and Emil von Behring could translate the pathfinding studies of Rudolph Buchheim, Oswald Schmiedeberg, Louis Pasteur, and Robert Koch into practical therapeutic innovations, no one had exclusive rights to a scientific clinical practice, and no matter how liberating the freedoms of the emerging republic might be or how much therapeutic promise America's rich and teeming fields and forests might hold, for the medical profession there would continue to be trouble in paradise.

1The concept of wonder as a catalyst to scientific inquiry is explored in Lorrain Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (New York: Zone Books; distributed by The MIT Press, 1998). On the New World see esp. pp. 146-149.

2Translated in 1577 and reprinted as Nicholas Monardes, Joyfull Newes Out of the Newe Founde Worlde, trans. by John Frampton, with an introduction by Stephen Gaselle, 2 vol. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925).

3For a discussion of herbals and herbalists (including Culpeper) see J. Worth Estes, "'To the Courteous and Well Willing Reader': Herbals and Their Audiences," The Watermark 18 (1995): 63-70; and Elanour Sinclair Rohde, The Old English Herbals (1922; reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1971).

4David L. Cowen, America's Pre-pharmacopoeial Literature (Madison, WI: AIHP, 1961), p. 19.

5For details see David L. Cowen, "The Boston Editions of Nicholas Culpeper," J. Hist. Med. & Allied Sc. 11 (1956): 156-165.

6Samuel Thomson, New Guide to Health, or Botanic Family Physician (Boston: E. G. House, 1825), p. 26.

7John William Ward, Andrew Jackson: Symbol For an Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 49.

8Ward, pp. 66-67.

9John S. Haller, Jr., "The People's Doctors: Samuel Thomson and the American Botanical Movement, 1790-1860," ms., pp. 128, 144.

10Ward, p. 45.

11For a complete treatment of the physio-medicals see John S. Haller, Jr., Kindly Medicine: Physiomedicalism in America, 1836-1911 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1997).

12For a complete treatment of the eclectics see John S. Haller, Jr., Medical Protestants: The Eclectics in American Medicine, 1825-1939 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994).

13Ronald L. Numbers, "The Making of an Eclectic Physician: Joseph M. McElhinney and the Eclectic Medical Institute of Cincinnati," Bull. Hist. Med. 47 (1973): 159-160.

14On the history of this sect see Harris L. Coulter, Science and Ethics in American Medicine: 1800-1914, Divided Legacy: A History of the Schism in Medical Thought, v. 3 (Washington, [DC]: McGrath Pub. Co., 1973); and the informative introduction in Francesco Cordasco, Homeopathy in the United States: A Bibliography of Homeopathic Medical Imprints, 1825-1925 (Fairview, NJ: Junius-Vaughn, 1991).

15Cordasco, pp. xvii-xviii.

16Alex Berman, "A Striving for Scientific Respectability: Some American Botanics and the Nineteenth-Century Plant Materia Medica," Bull. Hist. Med. 30 (1956): 7-31.

17G. Price Smith, "A Few Chapters on Medical Reform," Eclectic Med. J. 14 (1855): 446.

18Smith, 445.

19Charles Wilkins Short, "An Introductory Address to a Course of Lectures on Materia Medica," Transylvania J. of Med. & Assoc. Sc. 6 (1833): 461.

20William H. Cook, The Physio-Medical Dispensatory (Cincinnati: Wm. H. Cook, 1869), pp. 65-66.

21Charles J. Hempel, A New and Comprehensive System of Materia Medica and Therapeutics (Philadelphia: W. Radde, 1859), pp. 398-399.

22Galen suggested that the liver was the source of veins and that it was the organ responsible for the manufacture of blood, thus making it a central feature of his humoral theory. William Harvey's work on the circulation of blood published in 1628, De motu cordis, challenged this idea, but this refined knowledge of liver function did not lower the importance of that organ in the etiology of disease. For details see Lois N. Magner, A History of Medicine (New York: Marcel Dekker, 1992), pp. 90-92, 201-202

23James Johnson, A Treatise on Derangements of the Liver, Internal Organs and Nervous System, 3rd ed. (London: Thomas and George Underwood, 1820), p. 55.

24Among regulars, John Pechey had written about biliousness as a source of many ailments as early as the 1690s in his Collection of Chronical Diseases (London: Henry Bonwicke, 1692). Other noteworthy works discussing the primacy of the liver and "biliousness" in human disease with mercurous chloride as the remedy of choice include William Cullen, Lectures on the Materia Medica (London: T. Lowndes, 1773); Noah Webster, A Collection of Papers on the Subject of Bilious Fevers (New York: Hopkins, Webb and Co., 1796); John Faithhorn, Facts and Observations on Liver Complaints and Bilious Disorders in General; and on Those Derangements of That Important Organ, 2nd American ed. (Philadelphia: Hickman & Hazzard, 1822); and William Thomson, A Practical Treatise on the Diseases of the Liver and Biliary Passages (Philadelphia: Ed. Barrington & Geo. D. Haswell, 1842). Botanics also expressed their concern over liver function. Eclectics I. G. Jones and William Sherman, for example, sought to "relieve the spasmodic action of the duct" with hot hops or an "infusion of lobelia and boneset." Other suggested remedies comprised a hodgepodge assortment of botanicals including wild cherry, Culver's root, and dandelion. See their American Eclectic Practice of Medicine, 2 vol. (Cincinnati: Moore, Wilstach, Keys & Co., 1857-1858), 2, 269-337, passim.

25Johnson, p. 101.

26For details see Edward J. Waring, Bibliotheca Therapeutica, or Bibliography of Therapeutics, 2 vols. (London: The New Sydenham Society, 1878-1879), 2, 485-486.

27Louis Goodman and Alfred Gilman, The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics: A Textbook of Pharmacology, Toxicology and Therapeutics for Physicians and Medical Students (New York: MacMillan, 1941), p. 804.

28Edward Parrish, An Introduction to Practical Pharmacy, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Blanchard and Lea, 1859), p. 604.

29Wade Boyle, Official Herbs: Botanical Substances in the United States (East Palestine, OH: Buckeye Naturopathic Press, 1991), p. 57. Compare with the Standard Supply Table listed in George Winston Smith, Medicines for the Union Army: The United States Army Laboratory During the Civil War (Madison, WI: AIHP,1962), pp. 99-107.

30For example, see Jacob Bigelow, A Discourse on Self-Limited Diseases Delivered Before the Massachusetts Medical Society at Their Annual Meeting, May 27, 1835 (Boston: N. Hale, 1835).

31For a complete discussion of the use of these substances see John S. Haller, Jr., "Samson of the Materia Medica: Medical Theory and the Use and Abuse of Calomel in Nineteenth Century America. Part I," Pharm. Hist. 13 (1971): 27-34; Part II, Pharm. Hist. 13 (1971): 67-76; and his "Use and Abuse of Tartar Emetic in the 19th-Century Materia Medica," Bull. Hist. Med. 49 (1975): 235-257.

32Joseph Janvier Woodward, "Treatment of Diarrhoea and Dysentery," The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, 3 vols., 6 pts. (Wasington [DC]: GPO, 1870-1888), Medical History, vol. 1, pt. 2, 718.

33Charles S. Tripler and George C. Blackman, Hand-Book for the Military Surgeon (1861; reprint, American Civil War Surgery Series, no. 7, San Francisco: Norman Publishing, 1989), pp. 33-121, passim.

34The complete circular no. 6 is available in The Medical and Surgical History of the War, Medical History, vol. 1, pt. 2, 720.

35John King, "Calomel With the Regulars," Eclectic Med. J. 22 (1863): 434.

36John King, "A Home Thrust at Regular Medicine by the Surgeon General," Eclectic Med. J. 22 (1863): 295.

37E. P. Bennett, "Removal of Calomel and Tartar Emetic from the Supply List," Ohio Med. & Surg. J. 6 (1863): 348.

38Trans. Am. Med. Assoc. 14 (1864): 32-33.

39The court preferred three charges against Hammond: 1) "Disorders and neglects to the prejudice of good order and military discipline"; 2) "conduct unbecoming an officer"; and 3) "Conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline." For specifications see "Charges and Specfications," Med. & Surg. Rep. 11 (1864): 378-379. The court martial proceedings are covered in detail in Louis C. Duncan's two-part article "The Strange Case of Surgeon General Hammond," The Military Surgeon 64 (1929): 98-110, 252-262. See also Harvey C. Greisman, "William Hammond and His Enemies," Med. Heritage 2 (1986): 322-331.

40George Worthington Adams, Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil War (1952; reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), p. 41.

41Physicians in 1887 were prescribing calomel with the same frequency as their colleagues in 1854. Available data suggests that the use of calomel did not drop off markedly until the 1920s. See the comparison of prescribing behaviors of physicians in Burlington, New Jersey, in 1854 with those of Kentucky physicians in 1887 in David L. Cowen and Donald F. Kent, "Medical and Pharmaceutical Practice in 1854," Pharm. Hist. 39 (1997): 100; and E. N. Gathercoal, The Prescription Ingredient Survey: Consisting of the Ebert Survey of 1885, the Hallberg Survey of 1895, the Hallberg-Snow Survey of 1907, the Charters Survey of 1926, the Cook Survey of 1930, the Gathercoal Survey of 1930, the U.S.P.-N.F. Survey of 1931-32 ([Washington, DC]: American Pharmaceutical Association, 1933), p. 94.

42See, for example, Finley Ellingwood's long list of "liver stimulants" -- among them, may apple, Culver's root, blue flag (iris), fringe tree, garden celandine, American poplar, gumweed (grindelia), magnolia, dandelion, butternut, and spindle tree (euonymous) -- in his American Materia Medica, Therapeutics and Pharmacognosy, 11th ed. (1919; reprint, Sandy, OR: Eclectic Medical Publications, 1998), pp. 310-330.