Medical Protestants

This is a modern history of the Eclectic school of American sectarian medicine. Organised in 1845, the school was to exist for ninety-four years before closing in 1939, when they found themselves in the backwaters of modern medicine. Unable to break away from their botanic bias and ill-equipped to support the implications of germ theory, the financial costs of salaried faculty and staff, and the research implications of laboratory science, the Eclectics were pushed aside by the rush of modern academic medicine.