This movement is founded by Dr. Wooster Beach, a physician strongly against the mainstream medical practices of the time, including bloodletting and mercury treatment. Dr. Beach is also the founder of "eclectic medicine," which becomes a large, populist anti-regulatory approach to care that centers Asian and Native plant medicines and other botanical treatments and natural remedies.

Lacking any reflection on the theft of Indigenous medicines, it is often considered the first "truly American" form of medicine because of its use of native plants. Multiple schools and clinics will open in the Midwest, and herbal salves developed by those trained in this approach will begin to cross over into other forms of medicine. Eclectic medicine will wane once the Flexner Report is published in 1910 and does not acknowledge it as an approved form of care.