Alexander Wilder was born on May 14, 1823 at Verona, Oneida County, N. Y. , the son of Abel and Asenath (Smith) Wilder. Both parents were of old American stock, the Wilder ancestry going back to Thomas Wilder who came from England to Massachusetts Bay in 1640 or earlier. He was brought up on his father's farm.
He was educated in the common schools.
Alexander became a country schoolteacher at the age of fifteen. He is said to have published in 1846, when he was twenty-three, a pamphlet entitled The Secret of Immortality Revealed, which showed a strong mystical tendency. For some years he supported himself by teaching, farming, and typesetting. Having taught himself Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, he next took up the study of medicine in order to be independent of doctors in the matter of his own health but became so interested in the subject that he pursued it intensively under the guidance of a local physician and eventually succeeded in obtaining a degree from the Syracuse Medical College in 1850. For the two years following he lectured on chemistry and anatomy in the college. In 1852 he became assistant editor of the Syracuse Star but soon went over to the staff of the Syracuse Journal; in 1854 he was appointed clerk in the newly created state department of public instruction; for some time he edited the College Review and the New York Teacher; then in 1857 he moved to the city of New York where for thirteen years he held a position on the editorial staff of the New York Evening Post. In 1869 he published New Platonism and Alchemy, an enthusiastic biographical and expository study of the Neo-Platonists. Disbelieving in the use of animal matter in medicine, as early as 1848 he had founded a County Botanical Medical Society, and in 1869 he became president of the New York State Eclectic Medical Society, a branch of the National Eclectic Medical Association formed to promote "botanic medicine. " From 1867 to 1877 he served as president of the Eclectic Medical College; he was an editor of the American Eclectic Medical Review, 1871-72, and of the Medical Eclectic, 1873-77. Owing to his reputation as financial expert and political journalist on the Evening Post, he was elected an alderman of New York in 1871 on an anti-Tweed ticket. After this experience in politics, he moved to Newark, where he lived until his death. He was professor of physiology in the Eclectic Medical College, 1873-77, and subsequently became professor of psychology in the United States Medical College, serving from 1878 to 1883, when the institution was abolished by court decision. He is said to have published in 1873 Our Darwinian Cousins, and he subsequently edited Ancient Symbol Worship (1875), by H. M. Westropp and C. S. Wake; Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries (1875), by Thomas Taylor; The Symbolic Language (1876), by R. P. Knight; and Serpent and Siva Worship and . The Origin of Serpent Worship (1877), by Hyde Clarke and C. S. Wake. In 1875 he brought out Vaccination a Medical Fallacy, wherein he declared, "Vaccination is physically and morally wrong, and its advocates are interiorly conscious of it, or else they would trust to argument and conviction, " whereas he, in opposing them, professed to base his conclusions on irrefutable evidence. In 1882 he attended Bronson Alcott's School of Philosophy in Concord, and later took part in organizing the "American Akademé" at Jacksonville, Fla. From 1876 to 1895 he was secretary of the National Eclectic Medical Association, editing its annual Transactions.
Although a natural heretic and mystic, Wilder possessed a shrewd financial sense, an aptitude for politics, and considerable organizational ability. All his varied talents found expression during the decade of the seventies.
During his connection with the Evening Post he married a cousin, but the marriage was unhappy and a separation ensued.
