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Forgotten Medicine of the Gilded Age
History of eclectic medicine during the Gilded Age with a focus on the American Eclectic Dispensatory and Women's Medical Care.
Eclectic Medical Doctors and the promotion of health for women included exercise, temperance, and herbal medicine. These physicians were not homeopaths, and their texts were similar to other physicians of the day. What made these men and women stand out from other alternative medical therapists? The late nineteenth century was an age of discovery and in medicine, multiple alternatives were tried to achieve health. It was an age of hydrotherapy, hypnosis, electrical therapy, homeopathy, mercury, and bloodletting. Eclectic doctors tried it all, except bleeding and mercury. The goal was scientific experiments, things to restore women back to health. So, eclectics were adopters of multiple types of medical treatment for mysterious female disorders. This is a digital history website detailing examples of eclectic medicine for women. Some of the plants we know of today and still use. Some of the care is for disorders like hysteria, nervous afflictions, and masturbation. Extreme poisonous plants, to excision of the clitoris, were tried to cure hysteria and nymphomania. These cases are examples of how women patients were treated differently by eclectic medical physicians, yet still a sign of their times with a need to regulate women's sexual, emotional, and physical states.