Have you ever wondered who actually gets to decide what counts as “real” medicine, and who doesn’t? Or why plants, the oldest remedies on Earth, are considered “alternative” today?
Modern medicine, as an industry, is only a few centuries old. Plant medicine is as old as the human relationship with the living world. We did not inherit an “alternative” system of healing. We inherited the remains of one after long-standing traditions were systematically displaced, discredited, and separated from the cultures that carried them. This is the history of how that happened: who patented what, who profited, and who got erased along the way. It is not an anti-science story. It is the missing chapter of the science story.
It Started With a Crown, Not a Cure
The word “patent” comes from the Latin for “open,” and what became known as “letters patent” were literally open letters from the crown, publicly announcing a grant. In England, the monarchy had been issuing letters patent for monopolies since at least the 1400s, and by the reign of Elizabeth I, dozens of monopolies were granted over goods ranging from soap to salt to iron [1]. By the late 1600s, that system extended to medicine: the crown began granting exclusive rights over secret drug formulas, with no requirement to prove the remedy was safe or that it worked; only that it was “original.” One of the best-documented examples, Dr. Bateman’s Pectoral Drops, was patented under King George I in 1726. It was a mix of opium tincture and roughly 32 percent alcohol, marketed for coughs, colds, and children’s ailments, and exported to the American colonies by the 1730s [2]. That is the logic patent medicine ran on for the next two centuries: neither proven safe nor effective — just proven original enough to own.
America’s First Medicine Patent
On April 30, 1796, Samuel Lee Jr. of Windham, Connecticut, received the first U.S. patent ever granted for a medicine: a laxative called “Bilious Pills,” advertised to treat everything from yellow fever to jaundice to “female complaints” [3]. Lee’s pills spread up and down the East Coast, carried by traveling peddlers. His patent didn’t require clinical evidence, just paperwork.
Over the next century, that same pattern—a bold claim, a secret formula, no disclosure requirement—morphed into the patent medicine industry as a whole. Tonics, elixirs, and “cure-alls” were sold door to door and by mail order, most containing undisclosed alcohol, opium, morphine, or cocaine [4]. This is the era that gave way to “snake oil” being used as a literal description, not just a figure of speech as it’s often used today.
War, Morphine, and the Birth of an Industry
The Civil War accelerated everything. Morphine and opium were distributed at a massive scale to treat wounded soldiers, and many veterans left the war dependent on them. 19th-century writers later referred to this as “soldier's disease” or “the army disease,” though some historians today debate how widespread the phenomenon actually was, since verified contemporary records are sparse and the modern concept of “addiction” as a medical diagnosis didn't yet fully exist [5].
What’s well documented is that the war created the first mass market for the American drug trade. Physician Edward Robinson Squibb, who had left the military in 1858 to open his own pharmaceutical manufactory in Brooklyn, became one of the Union Army’s largest suppliers of medical goods, including morphine, quinine, and surgical anesthetics. By some estimates, Squibb provided roughly a twelfth of the Army's’s total medical stores by the war’s midpoint [6].
Out of that wartime drug economy, several companies still recognizable today took shape: Parke, Davis & Co. (formally incorporated in Detroit in 1875, later part of Pfizer) manufactured and marketed cocaine in cigarettes, powders, and injectable kits before cocaine was criminalized [7]. Eli Lilly opened his Indianapolis laboratory in 1876, building an early product line that included quinine and other era-specific tonics, while positioning his company in explicit opposition to the unregulated patent medicine industry around him [8].
Chemist Felix Hoffmann, working for the German dye-and-chemical firm Bayer, synthesized both aspirin and diacetylmorphine (heroin) within a two-week span in 1897; Bayer trademarked and marketed heroin as a non-addictive cough suppressant starting in 1898, a year before it patented aspirin [9]. In Chicago, physician Wallace Abbott founded what became Abbott Laboratories in 1888, building his business on “dosimetric granules,” or standardized doses of morphine, quinine, strychnine, and codeine [10]. And Merck & Co. was founded in the U.S. in 1891 to distribute chemicals, an offshoot of the German Merck company, which had been manufacturing morphine since 1827 and commercializing cocaine since the 1880s [11].
Meanwhile, a Licensed Botanical Medicine Thrived
While patent medicine boomed unregulated, a very different, fully licensed system of plant-based medicine existed alongside it: Eclectic medicine. Formally organized in 1847, Eclectic physicians earned medical degrees, practiced botanical medicine at dedicated colleges such as the Eclectic Medical Institute in Cincinnati, and openly credited the Indigenous and folk knowledge their formulas drew from [12]. Their central reference text, King’s American Dispensatory—first compiled by John King and later revised by John Uri Lloyd and Harvey Wickes Felter—documented plant preparations in detail and is preserved today in the National Library of Medicine’s digital collections [13].
The Reckoning: All the Rules Aren't Neutral
In 1905, journalist Samuel Hopkins Adams published an eleven-part exposé in Collier's Weekly, “The Great American Fraud,” documenting the alcohol, opiates, and false claims inside patent medicines [14]. That same year, the American Medical Association formed its Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry, which began grading drugs and awarding a “Seal of Acceptance” to the ones it deemed legitimate. In 1906, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, the first federal law requiring companies to disclose dangerous ingredients like opium, cocaine, and alcohol [15]. These reforms were badly needed. They were also written entirely by a single institution, deciding for everyone else what counted as legitimate medicine.
The Flexner Report
In 1910, the Carnegie Foundation sent Abraham Flexner—an educator with no medical degree—to evaluate every medical school in North America. Schools teaching botanical medicine, homeopathy, or Eclectic medicine were judged “unscientific” against a single biomedical standard. The Rockefeller-funded General Education Board subsequently directed significant philanthropic funding toward schools that restructured around that biomedical, pharmaceutical-aligned model [16].
The scale of what followed is well documented: from roughly 160 medical schools in the U.S. in 1904, only 66 remained by 1935 [17]. The closures fell hardest on institutions serving the students least able to absorb the loss: of seven medical schools then training Black physicians, five closed, leaving only Howard University and Meharry Medical College [18]. Most schools focused on women's medical education closed during the same period. The Eclectic Medical Institute in Cincinnati (nearly a century old) graduated its final class in 1939 [19].
Now & Beyond
Many of the pharmaceutical drugs on the shelves today can trace their origins to compounds first identified and used within Indigenous and traditional medicine systems. The plants get folded into patents, whereas the traditions that pointed researchers toward them in the first place rarely get the credit, and never the royalties.
“Decolonizing herbalism is not about rejecting science,” says our founder, Adriana Ayales. “It is about asking who gets to produce knowledge, whose traditions get called ‘evidence,’ and who has been erased from the conversation entirely.”
Now and in the future, we are so fortunate that we don’t have to choose between plants and doctors, or vice versa. Decolonizing herbalism is not anti-science or anti-medicine. What it emphasizes may not be widely discussed, but it is vital work: restoring credit, context, and reciprocity allows us all to imagine a medical future where ancestral healing and modern medicine are integrated.
Can you visualize a world with more humility, evidence, and care than any one system of care has offered on its own? Your own home apothecary carries that same lineage forward. Keeping your shelves lined with plants is still one of the oldest forms of self-care. Stock yours now to keep the botanical knowledge alive. Consider this your invitation to start working with plants as daily companions rather than one-off supplements, just as our wise ancestors did long before it had a patent number.
*These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
