Fyfe’s Materia Medica by John William Fyfe, M.D. 1903

(Eclectic Manual #6, 1903)

(80 pages, 2 across), Acrobat .pdf file, 5.5M

A well-known New York teaching physician, Fyfe bridged the gap between the charismatic Ellingwood and the careful and sometimes arcane Felter in this handbook, published, as were most major Eclectic medical texts, by Scudders of Cincinnati.

The manual was intended for the physician in practice, with clear and rather precise indications for therapeutic use. There is little of Felter’s almost encyclopedic listing of possible uses, rather the practical, centrist applications. There is little dwelling here on the nature of the actual botanical (Fyfe left that for J.U. Lloyd’s texts), nor is there complex dosology (Fyfe relying on the then readily available fluidextracts of the drug trade and the Specific Medicines manufactured by Lloyd Brothers)…a good, methodical Materia Medica for the clinical Eclectic-oriented doc of the turn of the century.

I have deleted the non-herbal agents, and purely medical herbs such as digitalis and opium, reformating it as a thumbnailed acrobat file to be viewed or printed “landscape” style, two pages across. I have included the rather lengthy and articulate introduction, and added an alternative name index, showing common names and adding current botanical names, where they differ from those of Fyfe.

Besides the clarity of therapeutic uses, Fyfe’s Materia Medica is also important for the number of little-known but common American botanicals that he treats…such “new” remedies as Ailanthus, Ambrosia, Catalpa, Clematis, Kalmia, Oxydendron, Polemonium and Rhododendron…cool.