John King

John King (1813—1893) was the eclectic physician who developed the botanical materia medica that defined the eclectic school for nearly half a century. His American Dispensatory (1852), which ran through eighteen editions, was the standard authority on vegetable remedies and indigenous American medicinal plants. King introduced concentrated botanical preparations — resins of podophyllum and macrotys (Cimicifuga racemosa), alkaloids of hydrastis and sanguinaria — that briefly distinguished eclectics from all other medical groups. Yet these same concentrates spawned a market flood of adulterated products that nearly destroyed the movement, and King himself eventually condemned them as “a most stupendous fraud.” He was one-third of the “Eclectic Trinity” alongside Scudder and Howe, and his social activism extended to abolitionism and labor reform.

Life and Context

Haller’s Medical Protestants (1994) records that King graduated from Beach’s school in 1838, set up practice in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and later called the first National Convention of Reform Medical Practitioners in Cincinnati in 1848.(Haller, 1994) He was on the faculty of the Eclectic Medical Institute, where he held the chair of obstetrics and diseases of women and children.(Haller, 1994) In 1870, he published the eighth edition of The American Dispensatory, which became the standard eclectic reference on vegetable materia medica.(Haller, 1994)

King defined eclecticism not as mere therapeutic openness but as a purposeful crusade. According to John Uri Lloyd’s account, King described the movement as working “in behalf of a kindly system of medication and the development of the American materia medica,” aiming to displace the depletive treatments inherited from European practice and to come into closer contact with ordinary people.(Caswell A. Mayo / Corinne Miller Simons, 1894) This was a man whose reform ambitions extended well beyond medicine: he was a vocal abolitionist affiliated with the Republican party and authored The Coming Freeman (1886), dedicated to the Knights of Labor, proposing a new representative form of government.(Haller, 1994)

The EMI itself underwent faculty reorganization in its early years. Wilder’s account records that Dr. Robert S. Newton came from the Memphis Institute along with Freeman, Sanders, and King to form a new faculty in 1851, consolidating the eclectic movement’s institutional base in Cincinnati.(Wilder, 1901)

King’s career at the EMI was not without controversy. Haller documents that in 1849, King was among five professors who signed a document — alongside forty-two out of 130 students — attesting that they had experienced drug effects merely by holding medicines wrapped in paper, as a demonstration of Joseph Buchanan’s psychometry doctrine.(Haller, 1994) More damaging, Haller records that in April 1856, King joined Buchanan and three colleagues in issuing seven thousand dollars’ worth of new stock without authorizing notice, attempting to change the stockholder composition and install Buchanan’s faction in control. Courts upheld the expulsion of the group, declaring the stock issuance illegal.(Haller, 1994) The episode revealed how the EMI’s internal politics could pull even its best pharmacological minds into factional conflict.

Core Contributions

The American Dispensatory

King’s American Dispensatory (1852) advanced the eclectic school beyond crude drugs in powder, infusion, and decoction. Haller identifies King as “the father of the reform materia medica,” whose Dispensatory went through eighteen editions and introduced the resins of podophyllum and macrotys along with the alkaloids of hydrastis and sanguinaria as mainstays of eclectic practice (Haller, 1999). The eighth edition (1870) became the standard authority on vegetable remedies and contained accounts of medicinal plants indigenous to the United States (Haller, 1994).

Concentrated Medicines and the Resinoid Controversy

Haller’s Medical Protestants (1994) records that King in 1846 described the resin of podophyllum and began prescribing it to patients, recommending it as a substitute for calomel, the mercury-based purgative that reform physicians especially despised.(Haller, 1994) William S. Merrell commercially prepared it in 1847, introducing the term “resinoid,” and established the industrial side of eclectic pharmacy with preparations of sanguinaria, hydrastis canadensis, and King’s resin.(Haller, 1994)(Haller, 1994) The preparation quickly assumed importance in the vegetable materia medica, earning the popular name “Eclectic Calomel.”(Haller, 1994)

King also experimented with oleoresins of macrotys (Cimicifuga racemosa), iris, black cohosh, and Culver’s root (leptandra), developing a class of soft resinoid extracts distinct from powdered resins — semifluid preparations that maintained their medicinal power without decomposing.(Haller, 1994)(Haller, 1994) These discoveries laid what Haller calls “the foundation for a class of soft resinoid extracts” that would become the basis of eclectic pharmacy for decades.(Haller, 1994)

The story of these concentrates took a damaging turn beyond Cincinnati. The Botanico-Medical College of Memphis had adopted King’s concentrated resins as a distinguishing feature, but by 1859 had been drawn fully into the eclectic orbit and then destroyed by the combined effects of the resinoid craze and the Civil War.(Haller, 1997) According to Griggs, King’s discovery of resinoids was partly accidental — a cold preparation from podophyllum root that precipitated overnight, a product that nearly killed a seventeen-year-old girl.(Griggs, 1981) Nevertheless, by the early 1850s the market was flooded with alkaloids, resinoids, resins, and concentrated medicines bearing claims that invoked King’s name. Gevitz records that most concentrated medicines were found by the mid-1850s to be adulterated or worthless.(Gevitz (ed.), 1990)

King withdrew his endorsement of all but the few concentrates he himself had discovered. Haller records that he publicly condemned concentrated preparations in the Worcester Journal of Medicine in 1855, writing that “I now wish to call [the] attention of all classes of physicians to a most stupendous fraud which is being perpetrated upon them.”(Haller, 1994) Lloyd later described the episode as a “resinoid craze,” comparing it to other professional fads.(Haller, 1994) His worst fears materialized in the closing of half a dozen eclectic schools and several physio-medical colleges.(Haller, 1999)

Haller judges that the reluctance of reform medical schools to carry out full scientific study of their medicines doomed much of eclectic pharmacy to scientific sterility and gross empiricism.(Haller, 1994) Yet one lasting contribution survived: the U.S. Pharmacopoeia officially recognized Resina Podophylli in 1860(Haller, 1994), and Haller lists the eclectic drugs that subsequently entered regular medicine, including podophyllum, gelsemium, caulophyllum, lobelia, hydrastis, baptisia, and sanguinaria — their passage into the Pharmacopoeia the result of general scientific interest rather than eclectic advocacy.(Haller, 1994)

The Eclectic Trinity and Specific Medication

King, alongside John Milton Scudder and Andrew Jackson Howe, formed what Haller calls the “Eclectic Trinity” — the three figures who steered the Eclectic Medical Institute through its renaissance years. King developed the materia medica, Howe perfected eclectic surgery, and Scudder introduced specific medication and managed the institution.(Haller, 1999) Haller further specifies that specific medication — the doctrine that defined eclectic practice after 1869 — derived from the combined labors of King, Ichabod Gibson Jones, and Scudder, replacing earlier doctrines of contraries and similars as the keynote of eclectic practice.(Haller, 1994) King’s pharmacological research was thus not separate from the specific medication doctrine: his work on podophyllin and the oleoresins was the raw material from which the doctrine’s precision was built.

Legacy and Influence

King donated his entire professional library to the Lloyd collection, significantly enriching its holdings in eclectic medical literature.(Caswell A. Mayo / Corinne Miller Simons, 1894) Haller records his death in 1893 and notes that by 1908 all three members of the Eclectic Trinity had died — Scudder in 1894, Alexander Wilder in 1908 — leaving only John Uri Lloyd to carry on the cause of reform medicine.(Haller, 1994) Haller’s account in Medical Protestants makes clear that the passing of Howe, King, and Scudder left the movement without an infusion of new blood, renewed commitment, or the kind of staunch defenders who had kept it intellectually vital.(Haller, 1994) Haller’s Medical Protestants (1994) calculates that by the 1930s, nearly two hundred specific medicines were in eclectic practice, with seventy percent of eclectic practitioners depending on one hundred forty different remedies — a pharmacopoeia that owed its foundation to the botanical research King had initiated decades earlier.(Haller, 1994)

King’s career traces a pattern common to reform movements: the initial enthusiasm for a new approach generates commercially exploitable products, the products are debased by manufacturers indifferent to quality, and the original advocate becomes the fiercest critic of the system he helped create. His willingness to publicly denounce the concentrates he had introduced distinguishes him from reformers who quietly accommodated the corruption of their ideas.

Scholarly Assessment

Haller, in both Medical Protestants (1994) and A Profile in Alternative Medicine (1999), treats King as the central figure of eclectic pharmacology — the man who gave the movement its distinctive therapeutic identity and who also, inadvertently, supplied the ammunition for its near-destruction. Gevitz in Other Healers (1990) presents King’s concentrated medicines as a brief commercial success that collapsed under the weight of adulteration. Griggs in Green Pharmacy (1981) gives the most vivid account of the resinoid disaster, including the near-fatal poisoning incident, and uses King’s story as a case study in the difficulty of translating botanical observation into reliable pharmaceutical products. Lloyd’s hagiographic Library and its Makers (1894) records King’s self-definition of eclecticism and his generosity toward the Lloyd Library without addressing the resinoid controversy directly.

See Also

• Wooster Beach
• John Milton Scudder
• Andrew Jackson Howe
• John Uri Lloyd
• Eclectic Medicine
• Eclectic Medical Institute
• Concentrated Medicines
• Specific Medication
• American Dispensatory
• William S. Merrell

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