The name commonly applied to the American School Physicians, a distinct group of Medical Doctors who trained in their own schools, and were licenced as M.D.s. They specialised in low-tech, nonhospital rural health care...the famous country doc with a black bag. Besides standard medical procedures, they used a more wholistic approach to disease, sometimes terming themselves Vitalists. They were the most sophisticated of the many movements that arose in response to the almost maniac medical practises of the first half of the 19th century, especially in the United States, where, as always, medicine was philosophically invasive and heroic (often a wonderment to visiting physicians from Paris or London)