Medical protestants

by John S. Haller

John S. Haller, Jr., provides the first modern history of the eclectic school of American sectarian medicine. The eclectic school (sometimes called the "American school") flourished in the mid-nineteenth century when the art and science of medicine was undergoing a profound crisis of faith. At the heart of the crisis was a disillusionment with the traditional therapeutics of the day and an intense questioning of the principles and philosophy upon which medicine had been built. Many American physicians and their patients felt that medicine had lost the ability to cure. The eclectics surmounted the crisis by forging a therapeutics built on herbal remedies, family practice, and an empirical approach to disease, and a system ostensibly independent of European influence. Haller makes clear that in the early decades of the nineteenth century when therapeutic nihilism threatened to destroy the bond between physician and patient, the eclectics offered an optimistic palliative that healed, comf