Use anything that works

Eclecticism had its origins in the work of Wooster Beach, an 1825 graduate
of a regular medical school who soon grew suspicious of the safety of
orthodox remedies. As early as 1827 he opened a school in New York City
to educate students in the full range of gentle botanical medicines, and as
public dissatisfaction with medical orthodoxy grew over the next two decades,
eclecticism became one of the more widely patronized systems. Its botanic
materia medica was steadily enlarged and refined, its educational system expanded
to more than twenty institutions, and more than sixty journals were
founded. Part of eclecticism’s appeal was its unusually pragmatic approach.
Alone among irregular systems, it made no attempt to rationalize the operation
of its medicines with a theoretical superstructure. “Use anything that works”
was its only principle, a rule that allowed practitioners considerable leeway to
do as they pleased and regular doctors wide scope for derision. “The Eclectics
keep themselves alive by swallowing everything which happens to turn up,”
The Medical and Surgical Reporter commented, “until they have become like
Macbeth’s cauldron.” In the eclectics’ “extraordinary conglomeration” of therapies
were to be found “all the ‘ics,’ ‘lics,’ ‘isms,’ ‘cisms,’ ‘ists,’ and ‘pathies’ ”
of all the other alternative systems.47