The Eclectic Medical Institute

While herbal medicine is as old as time, here in the U.S. one can establish a timeline for the recognition of herbal medicine as a medical discipline, evidenced by the formation the ‘Eclectic Medical Institute’ in the 1830/40s, and eventually the demise of herbal remedies as ‘accepted’ medicine with the downfall of that institute in 1939.  In fact, during this period there were hundreds of ‘medical’ schools that promoted homeopathy and herbal medicines, the Eclectic School was one of the most well-known and long lasting of these schools.

In the early days, The Eclectic school was known for freedom of thought, allopathics, herbalists and homeopathic schools , were considered based on the evidence that remedies and methodologies were efficacious.  Later the allopathic way, ‘organized medicine’, became the dominant tradition.  Interestingly, ‘pharmaceutical companies’ produced many of the herbal remedies of the times.

John Uri Lloyd, one of the well-known Eclectic practitioners and professors at the Eclectic School.  He eventually, around 1870 he began developing his own company to produce herbal medicines and became the exclusive supplier to the Eclectic School.  Each herb was studied and experimented with individually to determine the most effective way to produce efficacious remedies.

He was convinced that proper way to extract the powerful constituents of an herb was to use little or no heat in the process. He designed equipment to do exactly this process.  Today, Enerhealth is dedicated to the room temperature extraction methods on those herbs that we have found respond well to this technique.  Additionally, the herbal formulations you find on the website were designed by a student of a well-known modern-day herbalist, who many consider a modern day Eclectic, Michael Moore.  We owe a debt of gratitude to Linda Whitedove who did most of the formulations we offer today.

We have modernized the techniques described by John Uri Lloyd and believe that we have indeed improved on the processes of extraction and have adopted even older techniques used for hundreds of years called Spagyrics.  This is actually an additional extraction of the herb to render the ‘mineral salts’ of appropriate plants available to reintroduce into the original herbal extraction.   This has proven to be highly efficacious in those formulations employing that technique.

We take our collective hats off to the Eclectics and hope that their traditions continue well passed our lifetimes to enrich the lives of future generations.