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SECTS AND SCIENCE
The growing enthusiasm for “scientifi c medicine” did not stem exclusively
from a desire to improve medical care. It also played an important rhetori-
cal role in the battle for cultural and legal authority waged against sectarian
or alternative practitioners. During the fi rst half of the nineteenth century
regular medicine in the United States came to be closely associated with
such “heroic” practices as bleeding, blistering, puking, and purging, the
last induced by large doses of calomel (mercurous chloride), a mineral drug
that sometimes produced nasty side effects. Partially in response to this
situation, there arose a host of sectarian movements that challenged the
dominance of the regulars, from Thomsonianism and eclecticism to ho-
meopathy and hydropathy. All foreswore phlebotomy. The Thomsonians
and eclectics administered only botanical remedies; homeopaths relied
on infi nitesimal doses of drugs; hydropaths put their trust—and bodies—
in water. The sectarian assault on medical privilege in the fi rst half of
the nineteenth century erased virtually all legal restrictions to the prac-
tice of medicine, and medical licensing did not begin to return until the
1870s. Throughout the century regular physicians—or allopaths, as they
were frequently called—retained at least 80 percent of the medical market-
place, but with a rapidly developing physician surplus, sectarian compe-
tition became the regulars’ greatest fear. Science became their salvation.^52
One of the AMA’s fi rst acts after its founding in 1847 was to set up a
Committee on Medical Sciences, primarily to stimulate the production of
medical literature. The committee viewed scientifi c publications as “one
of the broadest lines of distinction between physicians and all pretenders
to the name.” Thus, it repeatedly called for the “systematic, and thorough
investigation of subjects connected with medical science,” reasoning that
“if the practitioners of Homoeopathy [sic], Thompsonianism [sic], Eclecti-
cism, Animal Magnetism, Needle Cure, Lifting Cure, or Water Cure [were]
required, as is done in Prussia and Austria, to be thoroughly educated in
scientifi c medicine... they would be comparatively harmless.”^53
Local and state medical societies thought the same way. In an address
before the Illinois State Medical Society in 1853 the prominent medi-
cal educator and reformer Nathan Smith Davis argued that “legitimate”
medicine’s “indissoluble connection with the whole chain of natural sci-
ences” distinguished it from “all the special pathys and isms of the day.”
“True medical science,” he declared, “is simply a part of the great science
of nature, while the art of practice of medicine is the application of the
knowledge derived from the study of such science, to the prevention and
cure of disease.”^54