Knowledge in the Time of Cholera by Owen Whooley Page A

failures of regular therapeutics, treated himself successfully using folk knowledge culled from experience. In doing so, Thomson was simultaneously the patient and the doctor—an arrangement he later championed in his system. He began treating his family and neighbors, and as his reputation grew, he abandoned farming to become a full-time practitioner. The remainder of the narrative recounts Thomson’s healing successes in the face of hostility and challenges from regulars. The lesson of his narrative is explicit: the talent for healing is not restricted to the profession; it is in everyone.
    According to Thomson and his followers, regular physicians, acting out of avarice and self-interest, would stop at nothing to prevent the public from learning this revolutionary lesson. In making medical knowledge available to all, Thomsonians juxtaposed themselves to regulars, who tried to maintain a monopoly over medical knowledge by obscuring its simplicity (Haller 2000). Education was a tool that regulars used to monopolize and mystify medical knowledge. Sarcastically challenging the intellectual pretensions of allopathy, the
Thomsonian Messenger
(1843, 74) dismissed regular educational elitism:
    We admit that we are not so wondrous wise as some of our would-be medical Solomons, nor can we so readily mouth the vocabulary of learned technicalities, as some of the M.Ds. But we consider that to understand LIVING ANATOMY, and how to KEEP ALIVE, is of infinitely more importance to both the patient and practitioner, than weeks, months, or even years spent in comparatively useless studies, or in shaking the dry bones of the human skeleton.
    Thomson himself (1825, 199–200) argued, “The practice of the regular physicians, that is those who get a diploma, at the present time, is not to use those means which would be most likely to cure disease; but to try experiments upon what they have read in books, and to see how much a patient can bear without producing death.” Furthermore, the regulars sought to confuse patients and obfuscate their inability to cure by using Latin, which concealed knowledge “in a dead language” (Thomson 1825, 193). Regulars “have learned just enough to know how to deceive the people, and keep them ignorant, by covering their doings under a language unknown to their patients” (Thomson 1825, 41). The secrecy of the regulars was opposed to the transparency of the Thomsonian system, which “so far from concealing discoveries or seeking to make a mystery of them” labored “to make them known for the benefit of the whole human race” (Thomson 1839, 50). Such a commitment to openness was on display during the 1832 epidemic, as Thomsonians made their anticholera recipe widely available to the public (Haller 2000).
    Contra allopaths, Thomsonians believed that relevant knowledge was not found in books, but in the common sense of the people. Folk wisdom was prized over education. Thomson (1825, 34–35) wanted to unlock the inherent, good sense of the people, hoping
    that it (the Thomsonian system) will eventually be the cause of throwing off the veil of ignorance from the eyes of the good people of this country, and do away with the blind confidence they are so much in the habit of placing in those who call themselves physicians, who fare sumptuously every day; living in splendour and magnificence, supported by the impositions they practice upon the deluded and credulous people; for they have much more regard for their own interest than they do for the health and happiness of those who are so unfortunate as to have anything to do with them.
    Underlying this egalitarian epistemology of common sense was a view of truth as transparent and acceptable, as nature provided the requisite clues for those careful enough to observe. The notion that truth was mysterious was anathema to Thomsonians: “Truth never seeks to be sheltered in mystery, she delights in simplicity,