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Brief History of Eclectic Medicine & Western Herbalism

  • loondogcleaning
  • Jun 27, 2024
  • 2 min read



The Eclectics were a group of American physicians who practiced a variety of healing modalities in the late 1800's & early 1900's. The philosophy was to provide the best type of therapy that was aligned with the body's natural ability to heal itself. They practiced bringing the patient back to vital health without the use of invasive therapies. Plant medicines and plant-based drugs were the primary source of healing techniques, but they also practiced osteopathy, homeopathy, hydrotherapy, and others. Eclectic medicine became an expansion of early American herbal medicine.


The Eclectic medical schools began to close in the early 1900's due to the rise of the petroleum-based pharmaceutical industry. The catalyst was the Flexner Report, a report written in 1910 to evaluate and restructure medical education. It was titled Medical Education in the United States and Canada. This was an in-depth assessment of 155 medical schools in the U.S. and Canada, and was redefining medical education, with the goal of creating more uniform standards. The project was funded by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Rockefeller Foundation. During this time, the discovery of petrochemicals (natural gas and petroleum-based chemicals) was shifting the scientific and medical communities to move away from natural healing therapies to implementing what we now know as Western medicine.


After this evaluation of medical education, the Eclectic schools began to close down because they did not align with these new guidelines of teaching medicine (plant medicine could not be standardized in the same way the petrochemical drugs could). Fortunately, some of the Eclectics' Materia Medicas were saved and can be found at The Lloyd Library and Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio.


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