ABSTRACT
The sectarian challenge thereby encouraged regular practitioners to shed their more aggressive therapeutic ways. Regular therapies were not just instruments of medical practice; they were also concrete expressions of the physician’s professional creed. Indeed, eclectic and homoeopathic practitioners never doubted that they were members of ‘the medical profession’, and claimed only the added distinction of having moved beyond regular bondage to tradition. Local and state medical societies multiplied and in 1847 the national American Medical Association was formed, in part to distance regulars from sectarians. The reigning historiographie emphasis on how sectarianism forced regular practitioners away from therapeutic tradition does more than just over-simplify a complex relationship. The stridency with which regular physicians defended the therapies in spite of their sharply declining use in actual practice during the antebellum period underscores the symbolic role they had assumed.
