Eclectic medicine was a branch of American medicine that 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 (1784–1841), a botanist and Transylvania University professor who had studied Native American use of medicinal plants, wrote and lectured extensively on herbal medicine, and advised patients and sold remedies by mail.[1] 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").