From a $20 herbal patent to a $6.8 trillion wellness economy

Key takeaways

• In 1813, Samuel Thomson patented a plant-based system of medicine and sold families the right to use it for $20.
• Sylvester Graham’s 1830s crusade for whole grains sounds a lot like the 2025–2030 federal Dietary Guidelines, released in January 2026, which encourage whole grains and discourage refined carbohydrates.
• By its own historians’ count, naturopathy grew from 1900 into a profession licensed in about a third of states by the 1940s, then shrank to about 175 licensed practitioners in the U.S. and Canada by 1980 before rebounding.
• Congress created an NIH office to study alternative medicine in 1991 and passed the main supplement law, DSHEA, in 1994, and both still shape your choices today.
• Every movement mixed sound instincts with untested cures, and their history gives you six quick questions to ask about the next wellness trend.

In 1813, a New Hampshire-born healer with almost no schooling obtained a patent on a system of medicine¹. Then Samuel Thomson did something unusual for a healer. He sold the method itself.

For $20, a family got the “right” to use his system and a small book of instructions¹. Buyers promised to keep the secrets and joined a Friendly Botanic Society¹. The pitch was freedom: the ideal, as the National Library of Medicine describes it, was that every man could be “his own physician”².

It sold. One of Thomson’s agents sold 4,000 copies of the book in the Ohio Valley and the South from 1827 to 1830, grossing $80,000¹.

Two centuries later, the Global Wellness Institute, a nonprofit that researches the wellness industry, estimates the world’s wellness economy at $6.8 trillion for 2024¹³. Between those two numbers lies a long American story. It has whole-grain preachers, water cures, breakfast cereal, a new profession, organic gardeners and Congress.

If you care about natural health, this history is yours. It shows how often reformers were ahead of their time. It also shows how often good instincts got bundled with bad cures, and learning to tell them apart is the most useful lesson the past offers.

Thomson’s patent sold self-reliance and a fight with doctors

Thomson’s theory was simple. Warmth was life, cold was death, and illness set in when poor digestion let the body’s heat drain away¹. So the cure was to bring the heat back.

Patients got that heat in a repeating cycle he called a “course of medicine.” It opened and closed with steam baths. In between came lobelia, in a dose strong enough to cause vomiting, and then an enema¹. That wild herb was the system’s workhorse, and a single dose could reach half an ounce of seeds¹. Capsicum, from hot peppers, added a stimulant¹.

His followers attacked regular doctors for bleeding patients and for giving opium, mercury, arsenic and antimony¹. They called mainstream medicine the “mineral school”¹. On bleeding, the critics had a point, as our companion article on historical healing philosophies explains.

Thomsonism had its own dangers, though. An 1895 history by a mainstream physician, no friend of the movement, tied big lobelia doses to repeated fatal poisonings, a charge Thomson’s followers denied¹. The movement split into rival camps around 1830¹. By about 1860 it had lost its schools and journals, and much of its energy had flowed to another botanic group, the eclectics¹.

The marketplace was crowded. Rival medical sects multiplied, and each claimed the best cures². In 1847, a group of physicians founded the American Medical Association to give their profession an authoritative footing².

Graham’s bread and the water cure made daily habits the medicine

The next wave moved from the medicine chest to the kitchen table. Sylvester Graham, born in Connecticut in 1794, was a Presbyterian minister who lectured for the temperance cause³.

Graham preached whole grains, fresh fruit and vegetables, and a meatless diet³. He told people to give up alcohol, tobacco, coffee and tea, and he railed against refined white flour³. His name lives on in graham flour, graham bread and the graham cracker³.

His followers, called Grahamites, multiplied after the cholera epidemic of the 1830s³. Graham boardinghouses and restaurants opened in New York and Boston³. Not everyone took him seriously. The writer Ralph Waldo Emerson gave him a teasing nickname about bran and pumpkins³.

Around the same time, a European import arrived. The water cure, or hydropathy, came from Vincent Priessnitz, a peasant from Silesia, and reached the United States in the 1840s². Its fans believed baths of many kinds could cleanse and strengthen the body².

Notice what changed. Thomson sold a treatment. Graham and the hydropaths sold a way of living. That shift, from cure to daily habit, became the backbone of natural health.

Battle Creek turned health reform into a destination

In 1866, Seventh-day Adventist leaders James and Ellen White opened the Western Health Reform Institute in Battle Creek, Michigan⁴. Under a young doctor named John Harvey Kellogg, it became the Battle Creek Sanitarium⁴.

Kellogg’s training shows how these movements blended. He first trained at Russell Trall’s Hygeio-Therapeutic College in New York City, a health-reform school, but found the teaching superficial⁴. With continued financial help from James White, he went on to the University of Michigan’s medical school and Bellevue Hospital in New York and earned a full medical degree⁴. He took charge of the sanitarium at 26⁴.

Kellogg drew a line between a sanatorium, where the sick went to recover, and his sanitarium, where people came to learn how to stay well⁴. Guests filled a five-story building with room for about 300 by 1891⁴. A typical stay mixed meatless meals, talks by the doctor, water treatments, electric-light treatments, calisthenics and breathing drills⁴. Today he is best remembered for corn flakes⁴.

Battle Creek also shows the movement’s shadow. Two national Race Betterment Conferences, in 1914 and 1928, met at the sanitarium, and Kellogg urged the creation of a national eugenics registry, which was set up in 1915⁴. Eugenics was the false and harmful idea that society should breed “better” people. The sanitarium went into receivership in 1933⁴.

Naturopathy built a profession, then nearly lost it

By 1900, the strands had a new name. According to the naturopathic profession’s own historians, Benedict Lust launched naturopathy that year, gathering many natural therapies under one philosophy drawn from Europe’s nature cure movement⁵.

The early toolkit blended American hygiene reform with the nature cure and water treatments of Germany and Austria⁵. Lust toured the United States giving talks and pressing lawmakers to license naturopaths. He also testified for colleagues charged with practicing medicine without a license⁵.

For a time the campaign paid off. The same historians report that the field had opened several four-year schools by the 1940s, and that about a third of states licensed it⁵.

Then came the long slide. In 1910, Abraham Flexner’s famous review of medical schools pushed for scientific rigor and standard training⁷. A 2010 editorial marking the report’s 100th anniversary, in the Brazilian public health journal Ciência & Saúde Coletiva, tallies what followed: U.S. medical schools fell from 131 in 1910 to 81 by 1922⁷.

By the editorial’s count, 16 homeopathic schools closed or became conventional medical schools between 1910 and 1920⁷. Five of the seven schools that trained Black doctors also closed⁷.

But Flexner is only part of the story. Thomsonism had faded half a century earlier¹. Naturopathy’s historians also point to infighting after Lust’s death in the late 1940s and to the rise of antibiotics and modern medicine⁵.

The low point was steep. In 1956, a few doctors founded the National College of Naturopathic Medicine in Portland, Oregon, so the field would survive⁵. By 1957, just one naturopathic college was left⁵.

A 1980 survey found only about 175 licensed naturopaths still practicing in the U.S. and Canada, the historians write, compared with roughly 3,000 practitioners in 1951⁵.

A new generation arrived in 1978. That year, a group led by Joseph Pizzorno founded John Bastyr College in Seattle to teach what Pizzorno called science-based natural medicine⁵.

According to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH), the U.S. had an estimated 5,000 licensed naturopathic practitioners by 2016⁶. Adult use of naturopathy rose from 0.2% in 2002 to 1.3% in 2022⁶.

Organic gardeners and Silent Spring took the fight to the farm

In the 20th century, the focus widened from the body to the food supply. In 1942, J.I. Rodale began publishing a magazine called Organic Farming and Gardening⁸. Its circulation grew from 260,000 in 1960 to 1.3 million by 1980⁸.

In 1962, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring documented harm from farm chemicals⁸. Naturopathic historians call the book a turning point in American thinking⁵.

U.S. use of the pesticide DDT had peaked at about 80 million pounds in 1959⁹. In June 1972, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) canceled nearly all remaining uses, citing unacceptable risks to the environment and possible harm to people⁹. The ban took effect on December 31, 1972⁹.

In the early 1970s, private groups began certifying organic farms, and six farmers formed California Certified Organic Farmers in 1973⁸. In 1990, Congress passed the Organic Foods Production Act, which called for national organic rules⁸. Our article on the four USDA organic labels explains what those rules require today.

Washington wrote natural health into law in the 1990s

In October 1991, Congress gave the National Institutes of Health (NIH) $2 million to open an office that would study promising unconventional therapies¹⁰. That Office of Alternative Medicine became a full NIH center in 1998¹⁰. In December 2014, it was renamed NCCIH¹⁰.

A bigger change came on October 25, 1994, when the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, or DSHEA, became law¹¹. In it, Congress found that nearly half of Americans regularly took vitamins, minerals or herbs, and that safety problems with supplements were relatively rare¹¹.

DSHEA treats supplements as their own category, separate from drugs¹¹. Labels may describe effects on the body’s structure or function, with a disclaimer, but may not claim to treat or cure a disease¹¹. If the government wants to treat a product as unsafe, it carries the burden of proof¹¹. Our article on why supplement labels say “supports” explains how this plays out on the shelf.

The wellness era is bigger, and now it is political

The Global Wellness Institute says the wellness economy grew 7.9% from 2023 to 2024 and now equals about 6% of the world’s economic output¹³. It projects nearly $9.8 trillion by 2029¹³. These are industry estimates, and the group counts a wide range of spending, from mental wellness to wellness real estate¹³.

Natural health themes have also moved into national politics. In February 2025, an executive order created the Make America Healthy Again Commission, chaired by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.¹⁴. Its May 2025 assessment named four potential drivers of childhood chronic disease: poor diet and ultra-processed food, environmental chemicals, inactivity and chronic stress, and overmedicalization¹⁴.

In January 2026, the federal government released its Dietary Guidelines for 2025–2030, which tell Americans to avoid highly processed food¹⁵. The official summary also states: “Whole grains are encouraged. Refined carbohydrates are not.”¹⁵. Graham would have recognized the sentence.

These policies are debated, and you can weigh them on their merits. The historical point is narrower. Food, chemicals, movement and distrust of too much medicine drive today’s arguments, and reformers raised the same themes in the 1830s, in 1900 and in 1962.

Two hundred years at a glance

Year	Milestone	What lasted
1813	Thomson patents his botanic system1	The belief that ordinary people can manage much of their own care
1830s	Graham’s whole-grain, meatless crusade3	Whole grains over refined flour
1840s	The water cure reaches the U.S.2	Hydrotherapy inside nature cure and naturopathy5
1866	Health reform institute opens in Battle Creek4	Retreats built around teaching healthy habits
1900	Lust launches naturopathy, by the profession’s account5	A profession with accredited four-year programs6
1910	Flexner reviews medical schools7	Science-based training as the standard
1942	Rodale’s organic magazine begins8	The organic movement and national organic rules
1962	Silent Spring is published8	The 1972 DDT ban9
1991	NIH alternative medicine office opens10	A federal research center, NCCIH since 2014
1994	DSHEA becomes law11	Today’s supplement label rules
2025–2026	MAHA report and new Dietary Guidelines1415	Too soon to judge

What held up, rated by the evidence

Every movement got some things right and some wrong. Here is how a few signature claims look now, using our four-level scale.

Claim	Who pushed it	Rating	What the evidence shows
Lobelia vomiting and steam “courses” cure disease	Thomsonians, 1810s–1850s	Evidence says no, or unsafe	Period accounts tied big lobelia doses to repeated poisoning deaths1
Choose whole grains over refined flour	Graham, 1830s	Strong evidence	Current federal guidance encourages whole grains and discourages refined carbohydrates15
Mass DDT spraying harms the environment	Carson and organic advocates, 1960s	Strong evidence	EPA found unacceptable environmental risks, plus potential harm to people, and banned most uses in 19729
Daily multivitamins prevent chronic disease	The 1990s supplement boom	Evidence says no, or unsafe	NIH says multivitamins do not appear to reliably lower chronic disease risk, though one review saw a possible small benefit against cancer12

The pattern is worth noticing. The movements were strongest when they urged better daily habits and caution about new chemicals. They were weakest when they sold one system as a cure for everything.

Many natural-health values in this story have aged well. Prevention, plain food, movement, rest and a wary eye on harsh treatments come up again and again. Reformers often spotted problems before institutions did.

Respecting that heritage doesn’t mean accepting every remedy that came with it. The reformers themselves argued, split, tested and changed course. Honoring them means doing the same: keep the instinct, and test the specifics.

Questions readers ask

The bottom line

American natural health has always mixed foresight with overreach. Thomson’s patent, Graham’s bread, Kellogg’s sanitarium, Lust’s naturopathy and Rodale’s gardens each pushed back against something real. Each also carried ideas that did not survive testing.

You don’t have to choose between honoring that history and questioning it. The movements that lasted did both, and the same habit will serve you well when the next trend arrives.

Related reading

• Humors, doshas and qi: what science kept from old healing philosophies
• Why supplement labels say ‘supports’ and never say ‘cures’
• The four USDA organic labels and what each one promises
• How state licensing works, and what it doesn’t promise
• Industrial life brought clean water and white bread, and history shows which to keep

Sources

1. Nichols JB. “The Thomsonian and Botanic Medical Systems.” Reprinted from The Medical News, 1895. National Library of Medicine Digital Collections. collections.nlm.nih.gov
2. National Library of Medicine. “So, What’s New in the Past? The Multiple Meanings of Medical History” (online exhibition and gallery captions). NLM, 1997; web version refreshed 2021. nlm.nih.gov
3. Clark E. “Sylvester Graham: Progressive Advocate for Healthy Living.” Connecticut History, CT Humanities, 2022. connecticuthistory.org
4. Hayward JL. “A Tale of Faith and Doubt: Reviewing the Latest Book on Dr. John Harvey Kellogg.” Spectrum, vol. 43, no. 1, 2015. andrews.edu
5. Zeff JL, Snider P, Myers SP, DeGrandpre Z. “A Hierarchy of Healing: The Therapeutic Order” (including “A Brief History of Naturopathic Medicine”). Foundations of Naturopathic Medicine Institute, 2019. fnminstitute.org
6. National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. “Naturopathy.” NIH, updated 2025. nccih.nih.gov
7. Nunes ED. “Centenary of the Flexner Report” (editorial). Ciência & Saúde Coletiva, vol. 15, suppl. 1, 2010. scielosp.org
8. University of California, Santa Cruz, University Library Regional History Project. “Cultivating a Movement: Timeline.” library.ucsc.edu
9. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “DDT Ban Takes Effect.” Press release, December 31, 1972. epa.gov
10. National Institutes of Health. “National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH).” NIH Almanac. nih.gov
11. NIH Office of Dietary Supplements. “Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, Public Law 103-417.” ods.od.nih.gov
12. NIH Office of Dietary Supplements. “Multivitamin/mineral Supplements: Fact Sheet for Health Professionals.” Updated 2024. ods.od.nih.gov
13. Global Wellness Institute. “Wellness Economy Statistics & Facts” (Global Wellness Economy Monitor 2025; industry estimates). 2025. globalwellnessinstitute.org
14. The President’s Make America Healthy Again Commission. “Make Our Children Healthy Again: Assessment.” The White House, 2025. whitehouse.gov
15. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and U.S. Department of Agriculture. “Eat Real Food: Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2025–2030” (official summary site). 2026. realfood.gov