Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.1 | The History Cooperative

Kindly Medicine: Physio-Medicalism in America, 1836-1911. By John S. Haller Jr. (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1997. xvi, 207 pp. $35.00, isbn 0-87338-577-2.)

John S. Haller Jr., professor of history and medical humanities at Southern Illinois University, has written extensively on the history of American medicine and racial attitudes. His present book examines the rise and fall of herbalistic "physio-medical" institutions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is a chronicle of institutional failure. 1

Nineteenth-century American medicine was strongly affected by populist sectarian tendencies widely abroad in the early republic and the Jacksonian period. Haller's story begins with Thomsonian herbalism—founded in New England by Samuel Thomson (1769-1843) and based on the emetic properties of Lobelia inflata (also known as Indian tobacco or pukeweed). Thomson and his followers opposed the use of bleeding and "unnatural" chemical drugs like the mercury-based compound calomel—mainstays of the "regular" allopathic physicians. The Thomsonians sought to cleanse the body with Lobelia and increase its internal heat with steam baths and herbal infusions, thus helping nature rather than defying it. They were vitalists, not mechanists. . . .

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