On July 27, 2026, RidgeCrest Herbals (Matt Warnock, owner, and Will Christensen, CEO) paid a long-overdue visit to the Lloyd Library and Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio. The Lloyd is probably the best remaining source of evidence about the Eclectic Herbal Medicine movement, the heyday of American herbal medicine, and the confluence of herbal traditions from around the world. Because RidgeCrest Herbals honors and uses many Eclectic traditions, and because the Lloyd Library is central to the Eclectic movement, it has been on our “bucket list” for some time.
Eclectic herbalism is one of the best features of America’s “melting pot” tradition. As immigrants came to the United States from all over the world, they brought their herbal medicines with them. They also began learning local herbal remedies from Native peoples, as well as plants used by immigrants. As trade increased with Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America, herbal and other medicines from every continent became available for study.
The Eclectic movement was founded on several basic ideas that we believe are still important today:
- Every individual is unique. Treat the patient, not the pathology.
- Pick what works best from conventional, traditional, and novel methods.
- Medicines are safe and effective only if we have many years of experience with them.
- Avoid harsh treatments; instead, support the body’s own vital healing force.
- Medicine is where you find it, but local, available, and affordable herbal medicines are often best.
Many reacted strongly to the so-called “heroic” medicine of the 16th through 19th centuries, which probably killed more patients than it cured. Bloodletting, purging with mercury compounds, and other common medical practices were hard on patients, and many doctors were looking for better ways to prevent, treat, and cure illness. Many turned to herbal medicines, though homeopathy, chiropractic, naturopathy, and many other alternative methods also had their roots in this period.
One early student of American herbal medicine was Samuel Thomson (1769-1843), a New Hampshire farm boy and self-taught herbalist who created Thomsonian Medicine. This system relied heavily on lobelia, cayenne, bayberry root bark, poplar bark, and other native herbal ingredients, rather than the “heroic” treatments of the conventionally educated physicians of his time. Thomsonian medicine became both immensely popular and highly controversial, especially among the college-educated physicians who were losing patients to an uneducated “quack” (as they saw him).
Another early American herbalist was Constantine Samuel Rafinesque (1783-1840). Born in Constantinople and self-educated, Rafinesque first applied the term “Eclectic” to describe a uniquely American system of medicine that, like Thomsonian medicine, was mostly herbal, but not limited to medicines from one particular region or school of medicine. Rafinesque was a devoted botanist and naturalist who may have discovered, published, and named more species of plants and animals than any other person in history. Rafinesque described the evolution of species in an 1833 publication, nearly 30 years before Darwin, who later acknowledged his influence. Rafinesque traveled widely and taught at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky from 1819-26, where he is now buried.
Later on, John Uri Lloyd (1849-1936) was an American pharmacist and a late leader of the Eclectic medicine movement. Raised in northern Kentucky, he and his two younger brothers were all apprenticed to Cincinnati pharmacists. By 1886, they took over an existing firm and renamed it Lloyd Brothers. John was the primary herbalist and research pharmacist, and was influential in the development of pharmacognosy, ethnobotany, economic botany, and herbalism. He invented a cold still for herbal extraction, and pioneered the first buffered botanical alkaloid compound for better stability and absorption. John’s younger brother Nelson managed the business, while Curtis, the youngest, collected books and studied mycology and traveled widely, sending books and specimens home.
The Lloyd Brothers pharmacy, library, and museum all grew quickly, spurred by the popularity of the Eclectic medical movement and its nearby flagship, the Eclectic Medical Institute and College, also in Cincinnati. The library and museum soon outgrew their limited space in the company headquarters, and began moving into a separate building beginning in 1901. As it continued to grow, it was spun off into a separate entity. Curtis never married or had children; in 1917, he set up a trust to fund the Library after his death, which his elder brothers later increased. Nelson died in 1925; Curtis died in 1926. John was the last survivor of the three brothers; after his death in 1936, the company was sold and eventually became part of the Eli Lilly drug empire. Luckily, the Lloyd library lives on.
For Eclectic medicine, though, the writing was already on the wall. Andrew Carnegie (the Steel King, of Carnegie Steel) and John D. (“JD”) Rockefeller (the Oil King, of Standard Oil) were the two richest “robber barons” and monopolists of America’s Gilded Age. At the urging of the American Medical Association, they ended alternative medicine, including Eclectic herbalism. Medicine and medical education would be modernized, monopolized, and standardized for the benefit of—well, everyone except the patients.
Rockefeller had an especially personal hatred of herbal medicine. His father, “Devil Bill” Rockefeller, was a medicine-show fraud, and also a bigamist with a second family unknown to JD’s mother. The shame that “Devil Bill” brought on the family was never forgotten. After JD made his fortune with Standard Oil, he drove herbal medicine from the market, and its customers into the arms of petroleum-based synthetic chemistry—his own Standard Oil monopoly.
Both Carnegie and Rockefeller had long engaged in viciously anti-competitive business practices, as well as violent strike-breaking tactics, to build their monopoly empires, so they both had serious public-relations problems. After reformer vice-president Theodore Roosevelt became president by the assassination of William McKinley in 1901, he ran and was re-elected in 1904 largely as a “trust-buster” of monopoly power. Carnegie and Rockefeller rarely competed, except for the title of “richest man on earth,” but their riches were paltry by today’s standards. Carnegie believed wealth brought responsibility—his “Gospel of Wealth” said wealth should be used to improve the lives of others. But Carnegie also famously quipped that Rockefeller’s fortune was twice-tainted: “t’ain’t yours, and t’ain’t mine.”
In an effort to repair their public images, both Carnegie and Rockefeller became philanthropists and policy-makers for education, though neither had been to college. They both endowed research institutes and universities, through which they funded industrial research and exerted academic and public policy influence without paying taxes (non-profits are not taxed) or facing antitrust (monopoly) regulation.
Their wealth, power, and influence continued to grow, even after 1901, when Carnegie retired and sold his holdings to J.P. Morgan to form United States Steel, and even after 1911, when Rockefeller’s Standard Oil monopoly was broken up into 34 regional “Baby Standard” companies—many with continued monopoly power in their individual regions. Today, Bill Gates and others follow much the same pattern—increasing power and influence, while reducing taxes, through investment and philanthropy.
Carnegie endowed what became Carnegie-Mellon University, as well as schools and libraries across the country; Rockefeller endowed the Rockefeller Institute in New York, and the University of Chicago. The “Chicago school” of economics and laissez-faire capitalism strongly influenced American antitrust, regulatory, and foreign policy throughout the twentieth century. Just one aspect of Chicago School policy—the idea of “shareholder primacy” championed by Milton Friedman—ensured that shareholders (including University trusts, foundations, pension funds, and other non-profit entities) wielded boardroom power that prioritized shareholder value above everything else.
In 1910, the American Medical Association, working with the Carnegie Foundation and the Rockefeller Institute, commissioned an influential report arguing that of 150 medical schools in the US and 5 in Canada, only 31 were worth saving. Abraham Flexner, an education reformer and schoolteacher and the elder brother of Simon Flexner, head of the Rockefeller Medical Institute in New York, wrote the report. The Flexner Report argued that only five other medical schools met the standard set by Johns Hopkins (the alma mater of both Abraham and Simon Flexner). Another 25 could be raised to that standard with additional funding, which Rockefeller and Carnegie also helped provide. The others were marked for death, and by 1935, most were closed—only 66 of the 150 remained in the United States. Panned were all the medical “sects” (as Flexner termed them): herbal medicine, Eclectic or otherwise; homeopathy, osteopathy, chiropractic, Ayurvedic, Traditional Chinese Medicine, acupuncture, and every other form of alternative medicine. Many of the discredited schools were graduating blacks, women, immigrants, and native Americans—effectively ensuring mostly white male doctors for decades.
The Flexner report had its intended effect, and perhaps many unintended effects as well. Every state medical board soon decided who and what could be licensed as medicine, under standards set by the AMA. Practicing medicine without a license was or became a crime in all states. By 1938, every new medicine had to be approved for safety by the FDA—a government monopoly. By 1959, the Senate was already holding hearings on price-gouging in the drug industry. In 1962, as a result of a safety failure (thalidomide), medicines had to be approved for efficacy as well, and the cost of medicine skyrocketed even more. False assumptions about modern medicine became curriculum, then doctrine, then law. These include:
- There is one best treatment for every disease, and clinical trials will find it.
- Everyone needs a single best “standard of care.”
- Single medicines can usually be both safe and effective for everyone.
- More potent medicines are better than gentler medicines.
- Only patentable new medicines are important in medical practice.
- Randomization works to eliminate human differences in trials.
- Blinding is generally effective–doctors and patients can’t tell drugs from placebo.
- Placebo effects must be avoided to ensure medicines are effective.
- Advertising prescription drugs is a good idea. (Only New Zealand agrees.)
Herbal medicines, used by millions for at least 60,000 years (that we know of), no longer had a path to market—they couldn’t be patented, so the costs of approval (now more than $2 billion per drug approved) could never be recovered. Herbal medicines eventually (in 1994) became dietary supplements that could not be used to “diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.”
The effect on the Eclectic movement was swift and, as intended, fatal. One by one, all the Eclectic schools closed, many donating their papers and libraries to the flagship Eclectic Medical Institute, which graduated its last class in 1939. The Eclectic Medical Institute sat just across the street (kitty-corner) from the present Lloyd Library facility. When it died, its papers and books were also donated to the Lloyd Library. The Lloyd Library witnessed at first-hand the death of America’s greatest herbal medical school, crushed under the heel of modern monopoly medicine. But most of the papers and books the Eclectics collected can now be found at the Lloyd.
The Lloyd Library has a wonderful staff dedicated to preserving and making its materials available to the public. We met with Noah O’Brien (Board President), Patricia Van Scaik (Executive Director), and several other archivists and staff members. All were friendly and helpful, and very keen to share their knowledge about the history of the Lloyd Library and its materials. They showed us two priceless Materia Medica (herbal pharmacy) volumes, both carefully colored by hand in watercolors, one in German dating to about 1600, and one in English dating to the 1700s. Both are fascinating examples of knowledge painstakingly passed down by practicing herbalists to our time.
Today, practicing herbalists and formulators have much more information at their disposal than at any time in the past. Repositories like the Lloyd (there are others, but none quite like the Lloyd) are now available to us all. They archive, catalog, and digitize materials that were once very difficult and expensive to find, allowing us all to build on 60,000 years of herbal medical experience.
If you are ever in Cincinnati, or anywhere near it (we drove 100+ lovely miles from Columbus) and have any interest in herbal medicine, I encourage you to do as I did: add the Lloyd to your bucket list, become a member, and make the most of their wonderful resources. The Lloyd is located at 917 Plum Street, Cincinnati, OH 45202, and is open Monday through Friday and on the 3rd Saturday of each month, from 9 am to 4 pm. You can find more about them at www.lloydlibrary.org or by calling (513) 721-3707.
