Knowledge in the Time of Cholera by Owen Whooley

Thomson saw his system as the defender of true medical knowledge—knowledge that was available to all. Under the Thomsonian system every person was to become his or her own physician (Kett1968). 5 The antiauthoritarian and even conspiratorial character of Thomson’s critique fell on fertile soil during the Jacksonian era, and his system spread throughout the country via a network of itinerant “healers.” It caught on, especially in poorer, rural areas (Coulter 1973, 92), growing through the careful exploitation of popular sentiments, egalitarianism, nationalism, and romanticism (Whorton 1982, 24). Although statistics from the era are notoriously imprecise, historians believe that during its height in the 1830s, Thomsonism claimed over a million followers (Berman and Flannery 2001; Haller 2000). In 1833, a Thomsonian magazine published a list showing authorized agents in twenty-two states and territories (Rothstein 1992, 45). By 1840, Thomson had sold one hundred thousand family rights, and approximately half of the citizens in Mississippi and Ohio were curing themselves using Thomsonian methods (Numbers 1988).
    The Thomsonian system by no means offered a revolution in medical ideas. In some respects, it was even more traditional than the medical system practiced by regulars, committed as it was to the type of rationalism that allopathy was in the process of discarding (Kett 1968). Drawing on the humoral system of disease, Thomsonians held that all illness arose from an imbalance of heat in the body. Tracing all disease to this single cause, Thomson believed that effective therapy required increasing the body’s heat through natural remedies like botanic medicine and sweat baths. Rather than combating nature through depletive therapies like regulars, Thomsonians viewed nature as inherently ameliorative and used it as their guide. In turn, they employed milder treatments with fewer side effects than allopathy’s use of calomel and bloodletting—two practices Thomsonians viewed as “unnatural and injurious” (Thomson 1825, 206). The milder treatments served them well during the cholera epidemic as they were less harmful than allopaths’ extreme heroic treatments.
    Although conventional in its medical ideas, Thomsonism aspired to revolutionize the relationship between the physician and the patient by exploding all hierarchies in medical knowledge. Foremost, the Thomsonian challenge was an epistemological one that denied authorities in medical knowledge. Appealing to egalitarianism, it stressed common sense and the common man as a knower (Haller 2000). The
Boston Thomsonian and Lady’s Companion
(
BTLC
) (1840, 338) championed the medical potential of folk knowledge: “The exercise of our reasoning faculties at once puts us in the right road to discover truth.” Thomson intentionally developed his system to be used by anyone, regardless of education. The system was written and distributed in an accessible handbook that anyone could purchase for a small price and subsequently use to treat his or her family. And Thomson promoted his system through stories, popular lectures, and poems that served as mnemonic devices (Haller 2000). Every individual could digest medical information presented in these forms. Everyone could practice medicine. Doctors were not needed.
    Thomson put faith in the agency of the patient to such a degree that the distinction between doctor and patient would be eliminated. Thomson’s own narrative embodied the ideals of his system, and he appended it to the numerous editions to his
New Guide to Health
. Uneducated himself, Thomson discovered the herb
Lobelia inflata
when he was four, his consumption of which quickly induced vomiting. While he did not yet recognize the significance of his discovery, this herbal emetic would become central in his therapeutic arsenal. In 1788, at the age of nineteen, he badly injured his ankle and after enduring the painful