The faculty adhered to the thought of the self-taught botanic physician Samuel Thomson who held that vegetative, not mineral cures such as calomel then widely used, was the way to treat illnesses. The Southern Botanico Medical College functioned here between 1839 and 1846, when it abandoned its campus across from the depot in Forsyth for a Macon location, leaving an unfinished building and no apparent impact on the local practice of medicine.