Fizz by Tristan Donovan Page B

of people were embracing the ideas of Samuel Thomson, the Pied Piper of quackery. An illiterate pig farmer turned herbal healer, Thomson was an unlikely health icon, but by the 1810s his firebrand approach to medicine had won him legions of devoted followers.
    Born in February 1769, Thomson grew up poor on an isolated New Hampshire farm. The nearest doctor lived more than ten miles away, so his family relied on the folk medicine of a neighboring widow for their medical care. “The whole of her practice was with roots and herbs, applied to the patient, or given in hot drinks, to produce sweating; which always answered the purpose,” Thomson recalled many years later.
    The widow’s cures fascinated the young, sickly boy, and he would often help her hunt for herbs and roots in the fields and woods. He dreamed about becoming a “root doctor” who would travel the nation dishing out herbal brews to raise the ill from their sickbeds. But it seemed like an unattainable dream. He was, after all, needed on the family farm, and by the time he turned sixteen he had dismissed his herbalist fantasies as childhood folly.
    Not that he forgot about the herbs. When he got sick he turned to the old widow’s medicine rather than seeking help from physicians, and every time he recovered he became even more convinced that his roots and herbs could remedy anything. His conviction grew deeper in 1789 when bothhe and his mother contracted measles. As Thomson’s mother lay dying in her bed, doctors battled to save her but their treatments proved ineffective. After nine weeks of fever she died. As usual Thomson refused to see the doctors, dramatically declaring he would rather die than accept their “unnatural” cures. So when he lived and his mother died, he once again concluded his root brews saved him, and came to believe that the doctors killed his mother with their dubious cures.
    So a year later when his wife fell gravely ill after giving birth to their first child, he called in the root doctors and when she recovered he decided it was time to follow his dream. He began administering his remedies to his family and neighbors. Then, as word spread, he began treating people for miles around. With his services in high demand he abandoned his pigs and began wandering New England selling his medical expertise. Thomson’s homespun medicine centered on expelling disease by inducing vomiting, sweating, or bowel movements in patients. To make patients sweat he would prescribe steam baths and to make them vomit he would feed them
Lobelia inflata,
a vomit-inducing plant also known as Indian tobacco, which Thomson believed could cure just about everything. Armed with his baths and Indian tobacco, Thomson went from town to town promoting his remedies while delivering furious rants against the medical profession, which he regarded as no better than “Java’s deadly trees.”
    Doctors initially laughed at the heavy-browed backwoodsman with his pukeweed and wild-eyed rhetoric, but as Thomson’s reputation grew it became clear that his diatribes against the medical profession were resonating with the public. In one case he so whipped up an Illinois crowd with his angry denunciations that they went on the rampage, killing a medical student and seriously injuring his teacher. Worried doctors began pressing for laws to curb his activities, but Thomson simply claimed such action was proof of the grand medical conspiracy he spoke about, winning over even more people in the process.
    Thomson’s star continued to rise for the next thirty years. He patented his medical system and began selling the right to use it to individual families for $500 a time on the condition that they kept the system a secret. By 1839 Thomson claimed to have sold one hundred thousand of these“family rights,” enough to have made him a billionaire in today’s money. But Thomson’s followers did not keep the secret. Many