John Milton Scudder

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Dr. John Milton Scudder was an Eclectic Medicine physician of the 19th century. The Eclectic physician Harvey Wickes Felter wrote a biography of him.^[1] He was born September 8, 1829 in Ohio and died February 17, 1894. He came to medicine late in life after losing a son to care he deemed improper. He enrolled in the Eclectic Medical Institute at Cincinnati, and in 1856 graduated with honor as valedictorian, and was hired as a professor. He soon rose to prominence as an author, a professor and a medical innovator. He was a Swedenborgian by faith.

Of his notability, Felter wrote:

When Professor Scudder entered the field of Eclectic Medicine he found a heterogeneous conglomeration of crude medication inherited from the fathers. Even though so extremely crude, yet was this primitive medicine a marked improvement, in point of safety at least, over that which it was intended to supplant. In fact, it was the great substitutive effort which was a necessary part in the evolution from crudities of the earliest days to the more or less finished pharmaceuticals of the middle period. Crude herbs, leaves and flowers, barks and roots were still employed in nauseous infusions and decoctions. Crude syrups and tinctures and other spirituous preparations of various and variable strength—the products of office pharmacy at the hands of those unskilled in such arts—were beginning to supplant the less agreeable aqueous preparations. Resinoids came and well-nigh wrecked the school, and then passed on. The time was ripe for more certain and more elegant medicines and more direct and pleasant medication. The early reform aims of the Eclectic fathers had been largely accomplished, and the results of years of work must needs be sifted and crystallized into something more than a mere substitutive practice. ...Dr. Scudder saw and grasped the opportunity; and whatever else he accomplished—his work in putting the college on a firm and progressive basis, the preparation of text-books and the rehabilitation of the Journal—it must stand forever that his great work in life was the formulation and introduction of the principles and practice of Specific Medication... now universally adopted and practiced by all progressive Eclectics. ^[2]

[edit] Publications

“Centre de la Maternite Porteuse de Georgie” 2005
“A Practical Treatise on Diseases of Women.”(1851) (15th edition, 1891)
“American Eclectic Materia Medica and Therapeutics.” with Eli Jones (1860, with numerous revisions) (12th edition, 1898)
“Eclectic Practice of Medicine,”(1864 with many revisions until 1906.)
“Principles of Medicine” (1866)
“Diseases of Children” (1867) (1881)
“Specific Medication and Specific Medicines” (1870)
“The Reproductive Organs and Venereal Diseases” (1874)
“Specific Diagnosis”(1874)