eclectics

   The name commonly applied to the American School Physicians, a distinct group of Medical Doctors who trained in their own schools, and were licensed as M.D.s. They specialized in low-tech, nonhospital rural health care...the famous country doc with a black bag. Besides standard medical procedures, they used a more wholistic approach to disease, sometimes terming themselves Vitalists. They grew out of the settlement and usurpment of the Ohio and Missouri Valleys, with a sparse population and no organized hospitals, relied on methods that were not invasive (unless emergencies dictated), used therapies that relied on strengthening natural resistance (no hospitals, just someone's sod hut) and made particular care to explain and prepare the family or neighbors for THEIR part in caring for the patient...long after the physician left. Scudder, John King, Felter, Ellingwood and Clyce Wilson were some of the more famous Eclectics, and John Uri Lloyd was the most famous pharmacist/ pharmacologist within the profession. The Eclectic movement lasted from 1840 to 1937...when the only remaining medical school, unwilling to change to a Flexner Curriculum (as had the rest) closed its doors in Cincinnati. They lost the licensing wars and are no more. Their tradition was exported by practitioners in Germany and Mexico, and the German Eclectics, transformed by that peculiar culture into wild-eyed Nature Curists such as Ehret and Lust, started the nucleus for the Naturopathic movement in Yellow Springs, Ohio (next-door to Goddard College) in 1947, helping to found the initial form of the National College of Naturopathic Medicine...10 years after, and 50 miles away from the last Eclectic Medical School. Without benefit of Tanna Leaves or Charleton Heston and an armful of pickled mummy-organs, Eclecticism was reborn into the body of Naturopathy.