Eclectic Medicine

Eclectic medicine was a branch of American medicine which made use of botanical remedies along with other substances and physical therapy practices, popular in the latter half of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries.
The term was coined by Constantine Samuel Rafinesque (1784 to 1841), a physician living among the Native Americans, and observing their use of medicinal plants. Rafinesque used the word "eclectic" to refer to those physicians who employed whatever was found to be beneficial to their patients (eclectic being derived from the Greek word "eklego", meaning "to choose from").
Therefore, "Eclectics" were doctors who practiced with a philosophy of "alignment with nature," learning from and using concepts from other schools of medical thought. They opposed the techniques of bleeding, chemical purging and the use of mercury compounds common among the "conventional" doctors of that time.