THE ECLECTIC SCHOOL.
This school, founded by Wooster Beach, instituted the most strenuous opposition to the employment of mercury, antimony, the blister, and the lancet. The members of this new school proclaimed that the action of heroic and noxious medicines was opposed to the operation of the vital forces, and proposed to substitute in their place safer and more efficacious agents, derived exclusively from the vegetable kingdom. The eclectics have investigated the properties of indigenous plants and have discovered many valuable remedies, which a kind and bounteous nature has so generously supplied for the healing of her children. Marked success attended the employment of these agents. In 1852, a committee on "Indigenous Medical Botany," appointed by the "American Medical Association," acknowledged that the practitioners of the regular school had been extremely ignorant of the medical virtues of plants, even of those of their own neighborhoods. The employment of podophyllin and leptandrin as substitutes for mercurials has been so successful that they are now used by practitioners of all schools. Although claiming to have been founded upon liberal principles, it may be questioned whether its adherents have not been quite as exclusive and dogmatic as those whom they have opposed. It cannot be denied, however, that the eclectics have added many important remedies to the Materia Medica. Their writings are important and useful contributions to the physician's library.