Traveling to small towns, Thomson exhorts botanical healing while never crediting Indigenous healers already in those communities. "He usually announced his arrival in city [sic], town, or hamlet by issuing invitational fliers to a public lecture, whereupon he explained his system of medicine, offered family rights to practice it for $20, and then proceeded to demonstrate it to purchasers... then [he] encouraged the establishment of Friendly Botanic Societies" (Flannery 2002), where rights holders formed a network for teaching and public relations. Thomson prides himself on teaching methods that do not depend on literacy for learning.