su
e
ec
n
c
Come
Visit!
ure...
es
cor
niture
cessories
Samuel Thomson
Katherine Smith, a local from Pinebluff, is
an Alaskan greenhorn and accidental poet.
She’s currently working in Chugach National
Forest, living to make life that is art.
THROUGH THE MUSCADINE continued
THROUGH THE MUSCADINE continued
The Botanic Empiricist
by Katherine Smith
Initiated by an old widow and schooled by
experience, Samuel Thomson marks the waning
of four centuries of leech doctors and the waxing
of the Eclectic physician. While sophisticated
practitioners prescribed bloodletting and
mercury because they should work, Thomson
used herbs and heat because they did.
Nineteenth century Thomson aligned
himself with the most ancient and archetypal
form of medicine. “I took nature as my guide,
and experience as my instructor,” he explains
in his 1832 memoir, because “there is medicine
enough in the country within the reach of every
one, to cure all the disease incident to it.”
Into a family of poor, zealous farmers,
Samuel Thomson was born on February 9, 1769,
in Alsted, New Hampshire. On land neighboring
the Thomsons lived an old “Widow Benton,”
probably Mehitable Crane, who cured 8-yearold
Thomson of scarlet fever with roots and
herbs. “When she used to go out to collect roots
and herbs, she would take me with her, and
learn me their names, and what they were good
for,” he wrote.
Over the next 20 years, Thomson cured
himself of a fatal wound through the ankle
joint and pulmonary tuberculosis with herbs.
He cured a nervous system disorder in his wife
and scarlet fever in his daughter with plants and
a makeshift sweat lodge of hot vinegar steam
inside a blanket. While the surrounded doctors
urged copious bleeding, mercury, calomel,
antimony, tartar emetic, and camphor, losing
many patients to “natural causes,” the neighbors
started to notice Thomson.
Thomson practice was based on the idea
that an imbalance of “cold, or measurably the
absence of heat, was the cause of disease.”
He restored that heat with steam, lobelia that
prompted intense perspiration and vomiting,
cayenne, black pepper, ginger, and an astringent
warming tea of backyard herbs. Hundreds
of pages of Thomson’s Materia Medica read
like gospels as he recounts curing cancer,
yellow fever, dysentery, and rheumatism. He is
compared in the text’s introduction to Saint Paul,
a man coarse and brutish preaching a simple,
life-changing message. Likewise, Thomson was
persecuted for his beliefs.
Perhaps due to Thomson’s success, his
doctor contemporaries banded together and
successfully had him incarcerated to be tried for
murder by his primary remedy, lobelia. Though
Thomson was acquitted after spending a month
in an unheated, lice-infested cell and a sham
trial, his hatred of the medical conspiracy against
him was entrenched. He patented his remedies,
and through agents selling his Improved System
of Botanic Practice of Medicine, Thomson
claimed 3 million faithful to his gospel of simple
healing with simple herbs by 1839.
But in the late 1830s, success infected
Thomson with the same sickness of the day’s
leeches-fanatic intolerance and paranoia. The
early 1800s birthed the Eclectics, practitioners
who incorporated old botanics with new
science. While a merging could have fortified
the Materia Medica and respect of natural
medicine, Thomson refused to relinquish
his dogma. “The moment you blend the
simplicities of my discoveries with…abstruse
sciences such as chemistry…that have nothing
THROUGH THE MUSCADINE con't. next column THROUGH THE MUSCADINE con't. next column
Come get lost
in the treasure...
Antiques
Home Decor
Painted Furniture
Handmade Accessories
T - F 11-5
Sat 10-5
• 5326 NC Hwy 211, West End •
• 910-673-0762 •
By L.S. Crain, S.Pines resident 1989-2017, now lives in Taylors, SC, his birthplace.
to do with medicine, that moment the benefit
of my discoveries will be taken from the people
generally.”
The last decade of Thomson’s life was spent
mostly on rallying against the “impositions”
and “counterfeits” foisted upon his system,
discrediting him publicly and disgusting his
own followers. But his life’s work represents a
vital pendulum swing. He broke the spell of the
heroic doses of mineral and plant-based emetics
and purgatives that had been the only medical
practice for at least 400 years, and popularized
old fashioned herbalism. As shown by history in
Thomson’s day, medical fads always end, though
they may take many innocent lives with them.
It is only root medicine from the ground that
remains. It is our human heritage and birthright,
and as Thomson recognized, the art and science
of intuition and observation. ☐
No. 135 The Pinehurst Gazette, Inc. p.33