Thomsonianism, Homeopathy, Hydropathy, and Mesmerism.

Thomsonianism was the first alternative system to be developed in America. It involved a program of botanical healing formulated in the 1790s by Samuel Thomson, a New Hampshire farmer. His combinations of plant drugs that either evacuated or heated the body (e.g., the emetic lobelia, cayenne pepper enemas) were warmly received by the public of the 1820s and 1830s. However, the system quickly foundered after Thomson's death in 1843.

Homeopathy, the system formulated by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann in the 1790s, established a foothold in the United States in the 1830s. Derived from Greek roots meaning “like the disease,” homeopathy treated constellations of symptoms with drugs that had been found to produce the very same symptoms in healthy people—i.e., like cured like. Homeopathic remedies were claimed to work most effectively after being carried through a series of dilutions that essentially removed all the matter of the original drug before the preparation was given to the patient; molecularly speaking, homeopathic remedies were “infinitesimals.” Hahnemann also coined the term allopathy—“other than the disease”—to signify the orthodox philosophy of neutralizing complaints with therapies opposite to the symptoms. By the mid-1800s, all alternative medical groups had embraced allopathic as the standard term for orthodox medicine; only in recent years has the word shed its negative connotations. Homeopathy was easily the most popular alternative system by midcentury, and would remain so into the early 1900s.

The next most popular medical alternative at midcentury was hydropathy, an Austrian creation of the 1820s imported into the United States in the early 1840s. The water-cure, as Americans liked to call it, stimulated the body to rid itself of disease through a variety of baths (usually cold), supplemented with careful regulation of lifestyle (e.g., diet, exercise, sleep, dress). Hydropathy maintained a sizeable following into the 1860s, but steadily faded after the Civil War. During this time in America, the rise and fall of Mesmerism, or magnetic healing, occurred. The invention of eighteenth-century Austrian physician Franz Mesmer, magnetic therapy relied on hypnotism and the power of suggestion to relieve patients; Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science in the 1870s, was highly influenced by this therapy.

Finally, eclecticism, as its name implies, was an assortment of therapies selected from all schools of practice, allopathic and alternative, on the basis of clinical experience. Originated by New York practitioner Wooster Beach in the late 1820s, eclectic medicine lasted into the 1930s