One Simple Idea (17 page)

The new breed of positive thinkers increasingly borrowed, reprocessed, and recirculated one another’s phrases and concepts. There were times when some of them crossed into ethical lapses. Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that this generation lacked vision. Rather, in the grand tradition of American religious experimentation, these men and women distilled ideas from their own perspective, verified those ideas through their lived experience, and tested their utility before audiences at metaphysical churches, occult lodges, and big-city auditoriums. These early- to mid-twentieth-century teachers did not always use the term New Thought, but they very clearly saw themselves as apostles of a mind-power revolution.

No single chapter, or book, could encapsulate all of them. But the most dynamic among them, who appear in the pages that follow, bent modern culture to their passions.

In the wake of the medical licensing laws, the early twentieth century was not a propitious moment for religiously or psychologically oriented approaches to medicine. Most physicians regarded any form of positive-thinking or faith-based methods, even when used as complementary treatments, as smacking of Christian Science, a philosophy they considered cultish and dangerous. Protestant churches took a similar view. While Catholicism had long maintained a measured faith in healing miracles and shrines, most Protestant seminaries and pulpits saw religious healing as something that had ended with the apostolic era.

Indeed, during the Reformation, Protestant movements often cast aspersions on the healing claims of the Catholic Church, considering talk of medical miracles as nothing more than the church’s attempt to
shore up its role as the exclusive organ of God’s word on earth. That attitude more or less prevailed at the start of the twentieth century.

A few early-twentieth-century physicians grudgingly used bread pills or sugar remedies to placate hypochondriacal patients, and some doctors recognized the usefulness of hypnosis as an analgesic. But any talk of using mental or faith-based treatments was considered heresy in the medical community.

Richard C. Cabot, a young, Harvard-educated physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, had a different take.

Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1868, Cabot, from his earliest years, inhaled the atmosphere of New England Transcendentalism. His father, James, was an intimate friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s, to whom he served as editor, literary executor, and early biographer. The Cabot family attended a liberal Unitarian church, and Richard studied at Harvard under William James and Idealist philosopher Josiah Royce.

William James was already devising the principles of the philosophy known as pragmatism. The heart of James’s pragmatic outlook was that the measure of an idea’s value was its
effect on conduct
. On this, James was uncompromising. To speak of allegiance to one creed or another was meaningless, he reasoned, unless you could demonstrate its impact on human behavior, “its
cash-value
, in terms of particular experience,” he wrote in 1898.

Such thinking gave Cabot a framework for his own radical inquiries. He decided to become a medical doctor—but, crucially, he held to the belief that healing, like all facets of life, must be a composite. He believed that biologic cures in no way precluded, and often were aided by, the confidence of the patient, which could be fortified by faith, suggestion, and realistic, healthful self-belief. Taking a leaf from James’s pragmatism, Cabot insisted that if a method healed, it was valid, whether the treatment was allopathic, alternative, spiritual, emotional, or any combination. While Cabot firmly believed that “spiritual healings” were really mental in nature, he conceded that the faculties at work were sometimes inscrutable, and warranted further study.

“It is a thousand pities that these dissensions—these sectarian dissensions—have occurred in medicine as well as in religion,” Cabot wrote in 1908. “We ought to get together. There is truth in all the schools; indeed there is nothing more characteristic of the American spirit than the realization of that fact.”

Cabot was a brilliant laboratory researcher—at age twenty-eight in 1896 he wrote the first English-language textbook on hematology. Yet he turned down an opportunity to become the first bacteriologist at Massachusetts General Hospital; two years later he accepted a less prestigious position in the outpatient department. Cabot was more interested in face-to-face treatment than in lab research. He believed that physicians were assuming an inappropriately distant and inflated role in the new century, and were neglecting the experience, emotions, social problems, and fears of the patient. In response, Cabot hired the nation’s first medical social worker at Massachusetts General in 1905. The hospital administration disapproved of the move and refused to pay her. Cabot paid the salary himself.

The following year, Cabot joined forces with a controversial and intriguing healing program, which emerged from an Episcopal church in Boston’s Back Bay. Called the Emmanuel Movement, for Emmanuel Church, which housed it, the project was a psycho-therapeutic clinic, presided over by the church’s Reverend Elwood Worcester and his associate rector, Samuel McComb. The men sought to aid patients through prayer, support-group meetings, affirmations, hypnotic suggestion, and medical lectures delivered by Boston physicians.

The Emmanuel Movement sharply distanced itself from both Christian Science and mind-cure, insisting that its focus was limited to “functional nervous disorders,” such as alcoholism, depression, migraines, chronic aches and pains, and digestive and bowel ailments. (This focus on “functional disorders” became a point of controversy, however, as the Emmanuel Movement also treated patients for tuberculosis, an infectious disease that then had no cure.) Further distinguishing itself from the mind-cure field, the Emmanuel clinic would see patients only on the
referral and diagnosis of a physician. Reverend Worcester framed the clinic’s activities not as an alternative to medicine but as a complement. The Emmanuel group received enormous, and often positive, media exposure, frequently from the nation’s largest magazines, such as
Ladies’ Home Journal
and
Good Housekeeping
.

Cabot became the Emmanuel Movement’s chief medical advisor in 1906. He was intrigued not only by the relief that its methods seemed to bring, but by how the movement addressed a large number of ailments that, while real enough, didn’t necessarily belong in the physician’s examination room. “Now, without trying to limit the field precisely,” Cabot wrote in 1908, “I should say that the diseases which are essentially mental or moral or spiritual in their origin should be treated (in part at least) by mental, moral and spiritual agencies. Cases of this type constitute in my experience about two-fifths of all the cases that come to an ordinary physician …” To Cabot the complementary approach was suited to disorders such as insomnia, digestive and bowel problems, and phantom aches and pains.

He felt, furthermore, that American medicine blinded itself with its specialized divisions. Every healer, from an osteopath to an allopath to a Christian Science practitioner, could speak of cure rates for those diseases
that came to them
, but not to the field of ailments in general. As Cabot saw it, medical professionals’ frame of reference was too narrow, their willingness to collaborate too limited. Share patients and share data, he urged.

While Cabot believed in the efficacy of faith-based or mind-cure treatments, his support rested upon a strict distinction between “functional” and “organic” ailments. The mind-healing movements, he insisted, were highly capable of treating the kinds of
functional
diseases seen at the Emmanuel program—that is, bodily discomfort and stress-related disorders—which were not bacterial or structural. However,
organic
disease—biologic and organ-centered disorders—absolutely required standard medical care.

“Our friends the Christian Scientists,” he wrote, “entirely ignore the
distinction between organic and functional disease. I believe that organic disease is not helped to any extent by mental means, while functional disease has been helped a great deal by this means. Hence, there is nothing more important than to make clear this distinction.”

Cabot’s reasoning squares with the findings of today’s most well-regarded placebo studies. The director of Harvard’s Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter, Ted J. Kaptchuk, told the
Wall Street Journal
in 2012: “Right now, I think evidence is that placebo changes not the underlying biology of an illness, but the way a person experiences or reacts to an illness.” (It should be noted that Cabot considered placebos deceptive and he explicitly opposed their use; Kaptchuk’s contemporary research, by contrast, centers on “transparent placebos,” in which a patient knows he is receiving an inert substance. Kaptchuk’s studies are considered later.)

For all the possibilities, Cabot and the Emmanuel Movement had limited success in winning the support of mainstream medicine. Cabot produced case studies and statistics showing traceable benefits from the Emmanuel program of prayer, encouragement, and religious counseling. Most medical professionals, however, turned up their noses. In journals and talks, physicians often complained that Emmanuel conflated the activities of doctors and clergy, and confused the public. (Cabot himself was never fully satisfied with the completeness of Emmanuel’s record keeping.) “The Emmanuel movement,” wrote physician Charles Dean Young in 1909 in the
Boston Medical and Surgical Journal
, “was and is, unquestionably well meant”—mental and spiritual healers had by this time come to realize that praise for good intent lined the steps to the guillotine—“but its originators are powerless to confine it within its legitimate bounds as the medical profession is powerless to prevent quackery, and, for some reason, the dear public does so love to be humbugged.”

That same year Sigmund Freud visited America and, while he acknowledged knowing little about Emmanuel, the psychoanalyst told the
Boston Evening Transcript
on September 11: “This undertaking of a few men without medical, or with very superficial medical training, seems to me
at the very least of questionable good. I can easily understand that this combination of church and psychotherapy appeals to the public, for the public has always had a certain weakness for everything that savors of mysteries …”

Ironically, the Emmanuel Movement, and other early strains of mind-cure, whetted the American appetite for Freud’s theories of the unconscious. William James, who had contemporaneously labored to track the existence of a “subliminal mind,” was dismayed by Freud’s certainty that his psychoanalytic movement alone had science at its back. James wrote a colleague on September 28 that Freud had “condemned the American religious therapy (which has such extensive results) as very ‘dangerous because so unscientific.’ Bah!”

The controversies were no help to Cabot’s career. In 1912, in what must have been a significant personal disappointment, Cabot was passed over for his expected appointment as Harvard’s Jackson Professor of Medicine, one of the university’s oldest medical professorships. Harvard instead opted for a professor who was more active in laboratory science. Cabot continued an important medical career, including as a director of battlefield medicine in France during World War I.

Following the war, Cabot launched a new campaign to urge American seminaries to train clergy in clinical and patient counseling. In 1925 he partnered with Anton Boisen, a minister who recovered following his institutionalization in a mental hospital to become one of the most eloquent voices for training seminary students in pastoral therapy. Cabot and his supporters met with measured success, helping to start pastoral training programs at Massachusetts General Hospital and Worcester State Hospital.

While widely copied in its early years, the Emmanuel Movement reached its end in 1929 with Reverend Worcester’s retirement. There were no ready successors to his leadership. Indeed, none of Emmanuel’s imitators were active for more than a few years. Emmanuel and its offshoots had petered out for reasons foreseen by Cabot: Ambitious clergy may have been willing to assume a counseling role, but they lacked
training to sustain rigorous, ongoing programs. “The average clergyman,” wrote Carl J. Scherzer, a hospital chaplain who had studied Emmanuel, “was not academically trained to undertake such a healing program even though he possessed a personality that might predict a reasonable amount of success in it.”

Cabot died in 1939, ten years after Emmanuel closed its doors.

Although Cabot and Emmanuel failed to win over mainstream physicians, the movement proved a greater impact on the churches themselves. In a national survey of liberal Protestant ministers in the early 1950s, more than one-third of respondents reported using methods of spiritual healing, which included affirmations, individual and group prayer, and acts of forgiveness—all elements of the Emmanuel program. This was a marked change from Protestant clergy’s indifference toward such measures at the start of the century. And Cabot’s calls for pastoral clinical training found new champions in the next generation.

When I was growing up as a teenager on Long Island, I once heard a young rabbi tell a religiously and politically conservative congregation that when we suffer inside we can also become deeper human beings. The formula for self-growth, he said, is “to turn your pain into a painting.” Some may have found it hokey, though judging from the silence in the room his remarks made an impact. I never forgot them.

Those words were a distant ripple from a Jewish spiritual-therapeutic movement that began in 1916 in response to the popularity of Christian Science among American Jews. In an echo of Mrs. Eddy’s phrasing, it was called “Jewish Science.” One of the motivational movement’s most eloquent exponents was a St. Louis, Missouri, rabbi named Louis Witt. Though Witt disliked the term
Jewish Science
for its derivativeness, he energetically spread the movement’s values into Judaism and other American faiths.