One Simple Idea (10 page)

While America had long possessed a literature that celebrated the pursuit of success—from the bootstraps principles of Benjamin Franklin’s
The Way to Wealth
to the rags-to-riches tales of Horatio Alger—money-getting was not a primary theme or even an accepted idea among most inspirational thinkers of the nineteenth century.

The New Thought poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox conceded in 1902 that the teachings of mind-power could be used for wealth. “But woe unto him who cultivates his mental and spiritual powers only for this purpose,” she wrote, adding: “The clear thinker and careful observer must realize there is one and only one main object in life
—the building of character
.”

Wilcox and New Thought’s other leading lights taught in the vein
of William Wordsworth’s poem “Character of the Happy Warrior,” which depicted the soulful warrior as one who “makes his moral being his prime care.” Such a tone prevailed in England, as well, where nineteenth-century writers adapted some of the motivational themes heard in America.

The prosperity gospel that most people associate with New Thought did not take shape until the 1890s—and even then it grew slowly and fitfully. Two causes contributed to its growth.

First, the American public in the late nineteenth century experienced a flurry of economic changes, both promising and disconcerting. For the first time, a wave of mass-produced consumer goods, from glassware to furniture, appeared on store shelves, in shop windows, and in catalogues. As these items proliferated, the economy itself was shifting from its agricultural foundation to a more urban-centered, manufacturing base. Money and markets were spreading, as were the cravings and anxieties of consumerism.

Second, in addition to economic changes, the late nineteenth century saw medical advances that brought overdue improvements into the examination room, easing the desperation of patients and, for the first time, creating reliable medical protocols. “Heroic” medicine vanished, and mainstream procedures grew safer and more effective. In response to calls from allopathic physicians, state legislatures also began to regulate and license medical professionals, with an eye toward restricting or eliminating the activities of mind-power practitioners and other “irregular” healers, such as homeopaths and botanists.

These shifts in economics and medicine changed the needs of the American public, and the face of New Thought.

The 1890s was an age of medical progress. Ads for patent medicines, from digestive syrups to baldness-curing creams, could still be found in most magazines, but medicine, like other fields of study, became more scientific and systematized. Colleges began graduate programs in the sciences and psychology. Physicians and researchers made dramatic advances in treating and preventing microbial diseases. The American public for the first time began to view doctors
as figures to be trusted rather than feared. State legislatures and courts, meanwhile, started to stringently scrutinize the mental-healing philosophies.

In several well-publicized cases, patients had died after receiving Christian Science treatments rather than normative medical care. No prosecutions resulted, as the courts were unable to demonstrate that conventional treatment would have resulted in different outcomes. In the wake of the controversy, the state of Massachusetts began to pass licensing laws designed to prevent religious healers from calling themselves medical practitioners. Other states had been tightening medical laws for several years: as early as 1880 the New York state legislature barred magnetic, or Mesmerist, healers from practicing medicine.

In Boston, Harvard philosopher William James grew alarmed that such moves would dampen the country’s mood of inquiry and experiment. In 1894 and 1898, James personally lobbied against licensing bills in Massachusetts intended to prohibit nontraditional medical practice, particularly the activities of Christian Scientists and mind-healers. Both times James won measured victories. He believed that mental healing was an unknown territory filled with possibilities, and that to place limits on it so early in its existence could stifle its potential. “I regard therapeutics as in too undeveloped a state for us to be able to afford to stamp out the contributions of all fanatics and one-sided geniuses,” James told a friend in 1894.

James personally used mind-cure and Christian Science methods several times between 1887 and 1909, receiving treatment for insomnia, depression, anxiety, and angina. He found the results could be at once tantalizingly effective and frustratingly elusive—a fact over which he agonized. “I think,” he wrote a friend in 1909, “there is a certain impediment in the minds of people brought up as I have been, which keeps the bolt from flying back, and letting the door of the more absolutely grounded life fly open. They can’t back out of their system of finite prudences and intellectual scruples, even though in
words
they may admit that there are other ways of living, and more successful ones.”

James’s position was difficult for his narrowest critics to understand. It wasn’t that he wanted to be
right
about the merits of mind-cure; rather he wanted to be
thorough
. He believed that allopathic medicine remained mired in its own brands of half-tested ideas, blind spots, and a general lack of transparency. Hence, James encouraged an open search for clinical possibilities—in both traditional and irregular fields of practice. Above all, he loathed seeing experiments in mental therapeutics stilled or stigmatized.

James brought to the mental-healing question the same passion for intellectual inquiry that fueled his interest into laboratory research of claimed psychical and paranormal phenomena. He nurtured a truly constructive skepticism—an approach that would be lost on future generations of critics, who were often unable to balance intellectual discretion with radical inquiry.

“It seems to me,” James wrote to a friend in 1898, “it is not a question of fondness or non-fondness for mind-curers [heaven knows I am not fond and can’t understand a word of their jargon except their precept of assuming yourself to be well and claiming health rather than sickness which I am sure is magnificent] but of the
necessity
of legislature interference with the natural play of things.”

James’s crusade for the open study and practice of mental healing came into public view in 1894. That year the Massachusetts state legislature was considering a bill prohibiting medical practice other than by physicians who held degrees from recognized medical colleges. In a letter of March 17, James protested the bill to the
Boston Evening Transcript
, naming three grounds for its rejection:

To those reasons, James added one additional note, which drew upon the public’s lingering mistrust of the mainline medical profession, even near the dawn of the twentieth century: “The
serious
therapeutic inadequacy which the population of Massachusetts, taken in bulk, is exposed to is the inadequacy of the regularly educated profession.”

Within about two weeks, the legislature struck a compromise, which James supported. Mental-healers and other nontraditional practitioners could function as they wished but could not advertise themselves as doctors or M.D.s. “In principle,” James wrote to the
Evening Transcript
on April 2, “such a bill seems to me excellent. The people have a right to know who is regular and who is irregular, and to follow their several affinities.”

All sides seemed more or less placated with the compromise. Within four years, however, the legislature was considering a stricter amendment to the bill, one that would once more outlaw medical practice by any but regularly licensed M.D.s. This time, James personally appeared at the statehouse in Boston to oppose the move.

In a packed meeting room on March 2, before a crowd that spilled outside the doors, the Harvard philosopher spoke before the legislature’s Committee on Public Health. His speech critiqued the persistence of a guild mentality among medical and research professionals. Cliquish thinking in any medical or professional culture, James said, served to elevate the opinions of those who are apprenticed within a given system, while disparaging or neglecting outsider perspectives. He asked the committee:

In his typical style, James concluded by shaking off his scolding tone with a wry conclusion: “The death-rate is not rising, in spite of all quackery.” The testimony represented James at his most skillful as a public intellectual. The committee unanimously voted down the bill. Yet it was not a complete victory for James. He was assailed in medical journals, including the
Boston Medical and Surgical Journal
, which called him “a spokesman of medievalism and an ally of quackery.”

It was also clear that the licensure movement, with or without James at its back, was rapidly spreading. By the time of James’s statehouse address, new licensing laws had been enacted in Ohio and New York, and were advancing elsewhere. During the 1890s, thirty-five states established some form of regulated licensure for medical graduates, and in fourteen of those states licensing was limited to graduates of board-approved schools. By the close of the decade, the Alaskan Territories alone lacked some kind of licensure laws.

While James was concerned that the licensing legislation might cast a chill over experimentation and intellectual inquiry, the overall state of mainstream medicine was, in fact, dramatically and rapidly improving.

Before the 1890s, American medicine had, for generations, lagged behind the nation’s progress in other areas of science. This was partly due to a lack of teaching and research facilities. At the start of the nineteenth century, only three hospitals existed throughout the country: in New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia.

Although Europe’s medical science and caring institutions of the nineteenth century were not dramatically advanced over America’s, Europeans benefited from a body of practical medical knowledge, from wound dressing to botanical remedies, which had gradually emerged from medieval guilds. Apprenticed apothecaries and informal healers ministered to dwellers of villages and industrial towns, while a higher class of physicians, who were trained in royal academies and universities, served the upper classes, who afforded them a good deal of respect. Europe’s immigrants to America generally came out of farming and craft trades; few trained physicians (who might be able to teach others) crossed the Atlantic.

Because American towns had little means of educating physicians, people often were left at the mercy of self-taught, erratically trained doctors, who were rarely held in esteem. The situation could be particularly difficult in frontier territories. In 1850, a survey of medical practitioners in eastern Tennessee found that 201 physicians served a population of 164,000—and of those practitioners only 35 were graduates of some kind of regular school. Almost half said they had received no instruction, beyond personal reading.

The crisis in American medicine experienced a dramatic turnaround in the early 1890s. Two factors brought improvements. On the research front, the “Paris School,” a late-nineteenth-century group of French biologists and physicians, developed advances in germ theory, which convinced doctors in Europe and America that many diseases arose from infections and disorders in specific organs. This finally ended the painful therapies of fluid-letting or bleeding, and introduced new protocols of sanitation and treatment of infections. Second, the Johns Hopkins Medical School opened its doors in 1893 with the express purpose of
normalizing and standardizing the manner in which medical education and licensure functioned from state to state. Universities and medical schools began to model themselves on the Hopkins teaching program, which imported methods from German teaching hospitals and medical schools, including mentored residencies and research requirements. With these advances, the nation’s medical profession began correcting the abusive practices that Christian Science and the mind-cure culture had arisen partly in response to.