ABSTRACT
Medical botanists of the Thomsonian school were clearly distinct from the regular practitioners and they entered the field with a blatant social challenge to the medical profession. As the developing medical profession was deeply concerned with its organisation and social cohesion, so increasingly were the fringe groups. Some differences based in medical theory were probably needed for practitioners to be recognisable as forming a ‘fringe’ group. The similarity of proprietary and regular medicines was also suggested in a study of medicines advertised for treating the diseases of women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and was supported by contemporary writers. The medical profession represented the institutionalised expression of the therapeutic ideas which the herbalists abhorred. Demarcation of the ‘fringe’ is therefore a matter both of medical theory and of social boundaries. Price has discussed hydropathy during its first three decades in England, concentrating on the resulting struggle within the medical profession.
