Samuel Thomson and the Poetry
of Botanic Medicine, 1810-1860
by
John S. Haller, Jr.
Professor of History
Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Carbondale Illinois
To Jonathan
May his muse run true.
Acknowledgments
This anthology of poetry comes from the botanic books and journals owned by The Lloyd Library and Museum, located at 917 Plum Street in Cincinnati . My special thanks go to Director Maggie Heran; Lloyd Scholar-in-Residence Dennis B. Worthen; Catalogers Carol Maxwell and Betsy Kruthoffer, Library Assistant Shauna Hannibal, and Library Assistant Kim Wissemeier for maintaining this wonderful collection of botanic materials and making it available to patrons such as me.
Introduction
In the decades prior to the Civil War, Americans from all walks of life enjoyed the products of the publishing world. From the penny newspaper to the sentimental novel and books on etiquette, history, law, poetry, and theology, people eagerly sought to increase their understanding of the world around them. Publishing houses in New York , Philadelphia , Boston , Baltimore , Cincinnati , and Charleston flourished as changes in technical production, advertising rates, methods of news-gathering, and even the selling of subscriptions revolutionized the printing industry and ushered in the age of mass print media. The New York Sun, the first successful penny paper in the United States , began in 1833, followed by the New York Morning Herald (1835), the Philadelphia Public Ledger (1836), the Boston Daily Times (1836), and the Baltimore Sun (1837). In 1800 there were 200 newspapers in the United States including 17 dailies, 146 weeklies, 30 bi-weeklies, and 7 tri-weeklies. By 1840, there were 138 dailies, 125 publishing two or three times a week, 1,141 weeklies, and 217 periodicals.
In 1830, book sales totaled $3.5 million. Schoolbooks accounted for roughly one-third; another third was divided among classical, legal, theological, and medical topics. By 1840, sales had reached $12 million. Of this, $5 million went toward schoolbooks and $1.6 million for medical, theological, legal, and miscellaneous topics. Boston and Philadelphia were the publishing centers for the country, with Cincinnati not far behind, with $1.3 million in sales annually. Orville Roorbach's Bibliotheca Americana (1852) provides a revealing look at the books in print in the United States during the period 1820 through 1852. A high number of how-to handbooks and manuals were published. From Jacob Abbott's Rollo Code of Morals and George Ackerly On the Management of Children in Sickness and in Health to T. S. Arthur's Advice to Young Men, Henry Ward Beecher's Lectures to Young Men, William A. Alcott's Young Man's Guide and R. L. Allen's Farmer's Muck-Book, Americans were a curious people whose interest in practical things abounded. How Americans formulated their culture amid the competing forces of materialism, optimism, restlessness, aggressiveness, and religiosity comes to life in the written works of the age.
Not surprisingly, regular doctors, along with botanics, eclectics, homeopaths, hydropaths, Mesmerists, phrenologists, and all measure of medical pretenders took to print in making their claims and counter-claims. As their writings attest, the richness, color, and spirit of American culture are very much alive in the medical literature of these decades. "The literature of a young and free people," wrote the long-winded physician Daniel Drake, "will of course be declamatory, and as such, so far as it is yet developed, in the character of our own. Deeper learning will, no doubt, abate its verbosity and intumescence; but our natural scenery, and our liberal political and social institutions, must long continue to maintain its character of floridness."
Along with the sentimental novel, poetry was read by all classes of people and strongly appealed to the gentler and more melancholy side of American culture. With notable exceptions, such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, women authored a disproportionate amount of the poetry published in the popular magazines. Although topics ranged from a crushed flower and a bride's farewell, to the death of a child or household pet, the elements of pathos, sorrow, passion, ennoblement, and pious reflection were singularly focused on some moral purpose.
This particular collection of poetry concerns the development of the botanical medical sect known as Thomsonism, and its founder, Samuel Thomson (1769-1843), at left. Beginning his professional career as an itinerant healer traveling a circuit among the small towns and villages of Maine , New Hampshire , and Massachusetts , Thomson transformed his medical practice into a successful business enterprise whose agents and subagents sold several hundred thousand patent-rights to his system of practice, along with an even greater number of books, and tons of botanical medicines. His popular New Guide to Health (1822) went through thirteen editions, including one in German, and countless thousands were reprinted without permission.
Over a period of several decades, Thomson melded his followers into a militant corps of dedicated believers, using them to successfully lobby state legislatures to pass medical acts favorable to their cause. He authorized agencies, infirmaries, and medicine depots in every state and territory; organized the first national convention of botanic healers fifteen years before the American Medical Association could muster its own corps of regular doctors; and popularized a distinctive "course" of medicine that became the regimen of choice for families in every part of the country. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Thomsonism became a household word for several millions of people.
Unlike the more standard poetry of the day, the poetry of Thomson's botanic reformers was written predominantly by men and intended mainly for medical purposes rather than for any moral, ethical, or pious objectives. In many instances, it even served as a vehicle for medical instruction, teaching families in mnemonic fashion how to monitor sickness and proceed with a course of medicine. Thomson's own poetry avoided the easy sentimentality of the day, substituting a more didactic idiom that stressed the evils of privileged rank, the pretensions of bookish learning, defiance against unfair laws, and the importance of popular sovereignty. His poems carried anti-elitist messages against lawyers, priests, and doctors; attacks against agents who betrayed him; recollections of past humiliations; and simplified explanations of his system of medicine.
By contrast, the poetry of Thomson's disciples was more reasoned, although not altogether moderate, and sometimes even quot ab le. Stretching from the epic and patriotic to the romantic, satirical, and pontifical, it encompassed a full range of emotion. At times, the poetry ranted pompously and predict ab ly as it challenged orthodoxy; on other occasions, it was more didactic and calculated to reason with those who had not closed their minds to change. Overall, Thomsonian poetry was a well of good-tempered ridicule aimed at orthodoxy, using the collective wit of its reform-minded botanics to effectively gain friends and disciples. Thomson and his reformers were a force to be reckoned with in the first half of the nineteenth century, capturing the minds and hearts of American families.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
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