The Toadstool Millionaires: A Social History of Patent Medicines in America before Federal Regulation (chapter 4, Samuel Thomson)
secondary literature · 1961
LINK
SUMMARY
Chapter 4 of the standard academic history of American patent medicine, by the historian James Harvey Young (Princeton University Press, 1961), reproduced in full with the author's and publisher's permission on the Quackwatch site (page fetched directly; posted 29 April 2002; that page is protected by an automated bot challenge and could not be re-fetched by the deterministic verify-quotes tool, so quotations from it are reported here in indirect/reported style rather than as verbatim-verified strings). Content fetched and used in this case: Thomson's 1769 birth on the New Hampshire frontier and childhood discovery of lobelia, which as a boy he fed to other boys for the sport of watching them vomit; the one-cause/one-cure heat-cold theory of disease and the aim of restoring the body's natural heat; the therapy of steam baths, cayenne, emetics, purgatives, and enemas; lobelia as remedy No. 1 of the patented six; the 1809 murder indictment and trial (Thomson accused of killing a young patient with lobelia; a defense attorney chewed the herb in court; the botanist Manasseh Cutler identified the prosecution's sample as marsh rosemary, not lobelia; acquittal); the 1813 patent (US Patent Office, obtained 3 March 1813) and 1823 renewal; the sale of family rights for $20 (100,000 claimed sold by 1839) organized through Friendly Botanic Societies, with a $500 admission fee and secrecy oath for participating physicians; opposition from regular physicians including Daniel Drake; the 1837 manslaughter conviction of a different Thomsonian practitioner in New York for a patient's death from excessive lobelia, the very fate Thomson himself had escaped in 1809; the patent's 1836 renewal and 1852 expiration, by which point the movement was fading fast; and the closing assessment that Thomsonianism was not a sound system of medicine for the American people, and that even Thomson's own medicines failed him in the end (Thomson died 1843). Young's own footnotes (not independently re-verified here) draw on Thomson's New Guide to Health, Alex Berman's 1951 Bulletin of the History of Medicine article, and other period and secondary sources.
NOTES
James Harvey Young’s The Toadstool Millionaires (Princeton University Press, 1961) is the standard academic social history of American patent medicine before federal regulation; chapter 4 is devoted to Samuel Thomson. The chapter is reproduced in full, with the author’s and publisher’s permission, on the Quackwatch site, where it was fetched directly for this case (that page returns an automated bot challenge to unattended re-fetch tools, so its content is reported here in indirect style). It supplies this case’s central secondary-source narrative and evaluative framing: the one-cause heat/cold theory, the 1809 murder trial and its marsh-rosemary reversal, the 1813 patent and $20 family-rights business, the 1837 manslaughter conviction of a Thomsonian practitioner for an excessive lobelia dose, the patent’s 1852 expiration, and Young’s direct assessment that the system was not a sound one for the American people.