Eclectic Medicine
Sustain the [patients'] vital forces – this was the creed of the eclectic physician. Eclectics were looked down upon by other medical practitioners because there was no primary defining nature to their school of medicine. As their name suggests, they used anything that worked, including Thomsonian remedies and Indigenous traditional knowledge.
Eclectics were also characterized by their anti-depletive stance, which meant that they were against treatments such as calomel (a popular mercury-based medicine), blood-letting, purgatives, and other methods that would deplete a patient's vitality.
Despite its lack of defining identity, eclecticism found itself with twenty institutions and more than sixty published journals.
