Samuel Thomson

[2] At the age of sixteen he had hoped to study with a local "root" doctor (at that time there was no official licensing of the medical profession) but his parents did not think he had the education and could not spare him from his work.

This I have long seen and known to be true; and have laboured hard for many years to convince them of the evils that attend such a mode of procedure with the sick; and have turned my attention to those medicines that grow in our own country, which the God of nature has prepared for the benefit of mankind.

[5]Eventually, Thomson came to believe that the exposure to cold temperatures was an important cause of illness and that disease should be treated by restoring the body's natural heat.

Thomson's methods for doing this included steam baths, the use of cayenne pepper, laxatives, and administration of the emetic Lobelia inflata (also known as "Indian tobacco" or "puke weed").

The expenses will be small and much better than to employ a doctor, and have his extravagant bill to pay.Moreover, his system of medicine appealed to the egalitarian anti-elitist sentiments of Jacksonian America in the 1830s, and families far from established towns came to rely on it.

At that time, licensed doctors and many of their methods such as bloodletting came under intense scrutiny, so Thomson's innovative system was presented as an appealing alternative that allowed each individual (working classes included) to administer his or her own treatment using natural products.

A favorable opinion of his system was given by the contemporary physician Daniel Drake, who perceived him as an American medical reformist: It must be a matter of national pride, that if Germany produced a Luther and England a Bacon, America has sent up from its humblest walks, a self-taught and gifted Thomson, who has done for medicine what those eminent men achieved for religion and philosophy.Another opinion by botanist William Hance was given before the Botanic Society in Columbus, Ohio, where Hance said of him: The science of medicine is confessed by the best men who have ever honored its splendid halls, or enlightened its mazy paths, to be in a very imperfect state; then why should we reject or condemn, without a close examination, a theory and practice merely because they are new or novel?

[8] His detractors like John Brown accused him of lack of anatomical and physiological knowledge, and they attributed Thomson's downfall to a reluctance to interact more with doctors.

He was legally charged by Lovett's father, but Thomson was acquitted when one of his defense counsel demonstrated that one of the prosecution's exhibits, labeled "Lobelia", was actually the plant marsh rosemary (Limonium), by consuming some in court.

I found that the patient was so far gone that the medicine would have no effect, and in two hours told him that I could not help his son, and advised him to call some other advice; this was said in the presence of Elder Williams, and Mr. Raymond.

In Massachusetts, they began in 1808 to get the Legislature to help them put me down, and in that State and many others, laws have been passed since that time to prevent my collecting my debts, and to make medical practice, without a college diploma, a crime.

Illustrating another case, Thomson wrote: Almost every newspaper from abroad brings the name of some person setting up as a Thomsonian Doctor and passing as my agent, of whom I know nothing and who knows nothing of my system or medicines from me.

The passion, the dogmatism, the vituperation of the period, the suppression of free thought and investigation outside authority, is a something that can not now be expressed or readily appreciated... he was involved by Mr. Locke in the famous Morgan Masonic controversy, the raging in New York.

[22] Thomson's ultimate position about his own system was stated four years before his death, when he wrote: I have devoted most of a long life to reducing to a safe and simple practice a system of medical treatment, that should remedy the evils with which mankind has been afflicted to an incalculable amount, ever since the introduction of mineral poisons in the fifteenth century, which have ever since, formed the materia medica of the regular doctors, as they are called, and which are given to cure sick men, though sure to kill well ones if administered to them...But I wish, while living, to see my system promulgated, if at all, in its purity, and when dead, handed down through others who will preserve it, and not let it fall back again into the pernicious practices that have so long plagued the world under high-sounding names of learned quackery.

If I am to be remembered at all, for I am past the age of ambition, I want it to be as a benefactor and not as a curse to mankind ; and this depends upon the fact, whether the learned Faculty on one side, from design and malice, and the ignorant Impostors on the other, from love of gain, shall abuse my system, and turn a great good into a great evil, till the people lose all confidence in the genuine by being poisoned by the counterfeit.I trust my life will be long enough to enable me to warn the people against these two rocks, upon which the Thomsonian practice will be in the greatest danger of shipwreck.