William James - The Letters of William James, Vol. 2

You, I fancy, are not one of the fully disciplined demanders of more legislation. So I write to you, as on the whole my dearest friend hereabouts, to explain just what my state of mind is. Ever yours,

James was not indulging in empty rhetoric when he said that his conscience drove him to face the disapproval of his medical colleagues. Some of them never forgave him, and to this day references to his "appearance" at the State House in Boston are marked by partisanship rather than understanding.

What happened cannot be understood without recalling that thirty-odd years ago the licensing of medical practitioners was just being inaugurated in the United States. Today it is evident that everyone must be qualified and licensed before he can be permitted to write prescriptions, to sign statements upon which public records, inquests, and health statistics are to be based, and to go about the community calling himself a doctor. On the other hand, experience has proved that those people who do not pretend to be physicians, who do not use drugs or the knife, and who attempt to heal only by mental or spiritual influence, cannot be regulated by the clumsy machinery of the criminal law. But either because the whole question of medical registration was new, or because professional men are seldom masters of the science of lawmaking, the sponsors of the bills proposed to the Massachusetts Legislature in 1894 and 1898 ignored these distinctions. James did not name them, although his argument implied them and rested upon them. The bills included clauses which attempted to abolish the faith-curers by requiring them to become Doctors of Medicine. The "Spiritualists" and Christian Scientists were a numerous element in the population and claimed a religious sanction for their beliefs. The gentlemen who mixed an anti-spiritualist program in their effort to have doctors examined and licensed by a State Board were either innocent of political discretion or blind to the facts. For it was idle to argue that faith-curers would be able to continue in their own ways as soon as they had passed the medical examinations of the State Board, and that accordingly the proposed law could not be said to involve their suppression. Obviously, medical examinations were barriers which the faith-curers could not climb over. This was the feature of the proposed law which roused James to opposition, and led him to take sides for the moment with all the spokesmen of all the-isms and-opathies.

"I will confine myself to a class of diseases" (he wrote to the Boston "Transcript" in 1894) "with which my occupation has made me somewhat conversant. I mean the diseases of the nervous system and the mind.... Of all the new agencies that our day has seen, there is but one that tends steadily to assume a more and more commanding importance, and that is the agency of the patient's mind itself. Whoever can produce effects there holds the key of the situation in a number of morbid conditions of which we do not yet know the extent; for systematic experiments in this direction are in their merest infancy. They began in Europe fifteen years ago, when the medical world so tardily admitted the facts of hypnotism to be true; and in this country they have been carried on in a much bolder and more radical fashion by all those 'mind-curers' and 'Christian Scientists' with whose results the public, and even the profession, are growing gradually familiar.

"I assuredly hold no brief for any of these healers, and must confess that my intellect has been unable to assimilate their theories, so far as I have heard them given. But their facts are patent and startling; and anything that interferes with the multiplication of such facts, and with our freest opportunity of observing and studying them, will, I believe, be a public calamity. The law now proposed will so interfere, simply because the mind-curers will not take the examinations.... Nothing would please some of them better than such a taste of imprisonment as might, by the public outcry it would occasion, bring the law rattling down about the ears of the mandarins who should have enacted it.

"And whatever one may think of the narrowness of the mind-curers, their logical position is impregnable. They are proving by the most brilliant new results that the therapeutic relation may be what we can at present describe only as a relation of one person to another person; and they are consistent in resisting to the uttermost any legislation that would make 'examinable' information the root of medical virtue, and hamper the free play of personal force and affinity by mechanically imposed conditions."

James knew as well as anyone that in the ranks of the healers there were many who could fairly be described as preying on superstition and ignorance. "X– personally is a rapacious humbug" was his privately expressed opinion of one of them who had a very large following. He had no reverence for the preposterous theories with which their minds were befogged; but "every good thing like science in medicine," as he once said, "has to be imitated and grimaced by a rabble of people who would be at the required height; and the folly, humbug and mendacity is pitiful." Furthermore he saw a quackery quite as odious and much more dangerous than that of the "healers" in the patent-medicine business, which was allowed to advertise its lies and secret nostrums in the newspapers and on the bill-boards, and which flourished behind the counter of every apothecary and village store-keeper at that time. (The Federal Pure Food and Drug Act was still many years off.)

The spokesmen of the medical profession were ignoring what he believed to be instructive phenomena. "What the real interests of medicine require is that mental therapeutics should not be stamped out, but studied, and its laws ascertained. For that the mind-curers must at least be suffered to make their experiments. If they cannot interpret their results aright, why then let the orthodox M.D.'s follow up their facts, and study and interpret them? But to force the mind-curers to a State examination is to kill the experiments outright." But instead of the open-minded attitude which he thus advocated, he saw doctors who "had no more exact science in them than a fox terrier" 17 17 These words were not employed in public, but were once applied to a well-known professor in a private letter. invoking the holy name of Science and blundering ahead with an air of moral superiority.

"One would suppose," he exclaimed again in the 1898 hearing, "that any set of sane persons interested in the growth of medical truth would rejoice if other persons were found willing to push out their experiences in the mental-healing direction, and provide a mass of material out of which the conditions and limits of such therapeutic methods may at last become clear. One would suppose that our orthodox medical brethren might so rejoice; but instead of rejoicing they adopt the fiercely partisan attitude of a powerful trades-union, demanding legislation against the competition of the 'scabs.' … The mind-curers and their public return the scorn of the regular profession with an equal scorn, and will never come up for the examination. Their movement is a religious or quasi-religious movement; personality is one condition of success there, and impressions and intuitions seem to accomplish more than chemical, anatomical or physiological information.... Pray do not fail, Mr. Chairman, to catch my point. You are not to ask yourselves whether these mind-curers do really achieve the successes that are claimed. It is enough for you as legislators to ascertain that a large number of our citizens, persons as intelligent and well-educated as yourself, or I, persons whose number seems daily to increase, are convinced that they do achieve them, are persuaded that a valuable new department of medical experience is by them opening up. Here is a purely medical question, regarding which our General Court, not being a well-spring and source of medical virtue, not having any private test of therapeutic truth, must remain strictly neutral under penalty of making the confusion worse.... Above all things, Mr. Chairman, let us not be infected with the Gallic spirit of regulation and reglementation for their own abstract sakes. Let us not grow hysterical about law-making. Let us not fall in love with enactments and penalties because they are so logical and sound so pretty, and look so nice on paper." 18 18 A full report of the speech made at the Legislative hearing was printed in the Banner of Light , Mar. 12, 1898. The letter to the Boston Transcript in 1894 appeared in the issue of Mar. 24.