Montreal Gazette

Anti-physician’s legacy is a hard one to stomach

- JOE SCHWARCZ Joe Schwarcz is director of McGill University’s Office for Science & Society (www.mcgill.ca/oss). He hosts The Dr. Joe Show on CJAD Radio 800 AM every Sunday from 3 to 4 p.m. joe.schwarcz@mcgill.ca

“I think we never had more need to be on our guard than at the present time. The people are crammed with poison drugs and the laws say they shall not examine and judge for themselves. The effects are pains, lingering sickness and death. Poison given to the sick by a person of the greatest skill will have exactly the same effect as it would if given by a fool.”

You might think that quote comes from one of the numerous websites that espouse the benefits of “natural treatments” over pharmaceut­ical drugs. It doesn’t. It actually was uttered some 200 years ago by Samuel Thomson, an uneducated pig farmer whose philosophy that any man could be his own physician took America by storm. Eventually, Thomson’s self-help health care would be embraced by more than three million Americans, and his ideas would even spread to Europe.

Thomson’s claim was that diseases could be cured by the use of herbs and heat. While his system of healing used some 60 herbs, Lobelia inflata, also known as “puke weed” or “Indian tobacco,” was front and centre. Puke weed is a very appropriat­e name because ingesting the flowers, seeds or roots of the plant makes people, let us just say, lose their breakfast. Thomson thought that before healing could commence, toxins had to be eliminated and puke weed was just right for the job. This was not a novel idea; convention­al physicians at the time used mercurous chloride, better known as calomel, to purge patients. Lobelia’s effects were less violent and Thomson’s theory that people could cure themselves without relying on doctors appealed to a lot of people. Thomson was not the first to experiment with lobelia. Native Americans treated dozens of ailments with the herb, ranging from fevers and venereal diseases to earaches and stiff necks. Lobelia also had a reputation as a love potion, which is hard to explain. Vomiting and love usually don’t go together.

In Thomson’s regimen, after the puke weed had finished its performanc­e it was time for steam baths and cayenne pepper, often in the form of an enema, to restore the body’s heat. If there were still complaints, other courses of treatment would follow with complex mixtures of such herbs as ginseng, peppermint and horseradis­h, often mixed with camphor and turpentine.

As is often the case for “alternativ­e therapies,” Thomsonism was rooted in its patriarch’s personal experience. Young Sam became curious about a plant that grew wildly in his father’s fields and for some strange reason tried chewing its pods. The effect was dramatic. It seems the man whom skeptics would eventually call the “puke doctor” had a funny bone. He convinced some of his friends to sample lobelia and had a good laugh at their expense. His interest in plants aroused, Thomson began to follow the healing abilities of an “old wife” in the area who had a reputation for curing people with herbs, often consumed as a brew in hot water to produce sweating. He was intrigued when she managed to cure his rash with an herbal concoction. And then came a couple of catalytic events.

At the age of 19, Thomson sustained an ankle injury that defied convention­al treatment but resolved when he took comfrey root and applied a turpentine plaster. Two years later, his mother contracted measles that turned into what doctors called “galloping consumptio­n.” Thomson later commented that this had been an appropriat­e name because the doctors were riders and they galloped her out of the world in about nine weeks. But when he contracted the disease, he claimed to have cured himself with herbs. When Thomson later saw his wife cured by herbalists after doctors had failed, and he himself managed to cure his infant daughter of some skin condition by holding her over steaming water, Thomsonism was ready to gallop. Doctors, or educated quacks as Thomson called them, may have had their fancy degrees, but their blistering, bleeding and purging were worse than useless. He could cure people instead with herbs and steam! Herbs grew toward the sun, the life-giving source of heat, and therefore must refresh one’s health.

As one might expect, physicians didn’t take kindly to Thomson’s attacks, and in 1809 one actually managed to accuse him of killing a patient with an overdose of lobelia. The puke doctor had to await his trial in a cell for six weeks. At the trial he claimed that he had actually cured the patient, who was responsibl­e for his own demise by venturing out into the cold instead of recuperati­ng in a warm house. Meanwhile, the prosecutio­n maintained that the victim had succumbed because of excessive vomiting brought on by lobelia. It is unlikely that this was the case because lobelia does not induce such dangerous vomiting, but Thomson actually was exonerated because of a botanical error by the prosecutio­n. An astute defence attorney noted that the plant the prosecutio­n had introduced as evidence was actually marsh rosemary and not lobelia. That was enough for the case to be dismissed.

Thomsonian­s regarded the dismissal as vindicatio­n of their efforts and the movement continued to pick up steam. Indeed, it was the popularity of Thomsonism that led to the repeal of the laws that a number of states had passed restrictin­g the practice of unconventi­onal medicine. Opponents had labelled these “Black Laws” in reference to those that restricted black Americans from practising medicine. Eventually, Thomson’s movement faded when some of his followers grew tired of his attacks on physicians and his drive to end physician licensing. They wanted more legitimacy and urged more training and even the establishm­ent of Thomsonian hospitals. That never happened, but Thomsonism holds a unique place in history as a pivotal factor in allowing unconventi­onal treatments to legally flourish in spite of a lack of evidence for efficacy. It is one of the pillars upon which modern naturopath­y rests.

Some practition­ers today still recommend lobelia as a “blood cleanser” and as a respirator­y stimulant to treat asthma, while Boiron Laboratori­es markets Lobelia inflata as a homeopathi­c remedy to wean off smoking. Unlike with the herbal preparatio­n, there is no concern here about side effects since the homeopathi­c remedy has been diluted to an extent that it contains essentiall­y no lobelia. Unfortunat­ely, it seems that Samuel Thomson’s legacy of eschewing schooling and science in favour of reliance on “intuitive wisdom” and “nature’s pharmacy” is still with us.

 ?? GAZETTE FILES ?? Samuel Thomson, who died in 1843, was a fan of an herb called Lobelia inflate, also known as puke weed or Indian tobacco.
GAZETTE FILES Samuel Thomson, who died in 1843, was a fan of an herb called Lobelia inflate, also known as puke weed or Indian tobacco.
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