The diploma mills were encouraged by a public that abhorred government regulation or any interference with the rights of the common man to do as he wished. There were no licensing requirements for medical personnel or professional oversight. In the face of declining respectability, physicians, anxious to reestablish their credentials, began to use more extreme depletion methods. Their model was Benjamin Rush, who as a leading physician at the turn of the century proposed using more extreme bleeding and purging. The poorly trained could point to the dramatic effects of their therapies as a form of success.
But not all people accepted this “heroic” medicine. The result was a proliferation of competing health initiatives, a growth of medical sectarians such as homeopaths, hydropaths, new botanical theorists such as Thomsonianism as well as fitness gurus such as Sylvester Graham and John Harvey Kellogg. The sugar-coated pill advertised by a variety of entrepreneurs also competed freely. They had only to patent the shape of the bottles. There was no control over their ingredients. The medical scene in the nineteenth century was a chaotic free-for-all.
