The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [69]
The clutter of life and material necessity crowded into James’s mind, into his work. He felt so unwell that he’d resorted to consulting a “mindcure doctress.” He had visited her eleven times for relaxation therapy: “I sit down beside her and presently drop asleep, whilst she disentangles the snarls out of my mind. She said she never saw a mind with so many, so agitated, so restless, etc. She said my eyes, mentally speaking, kept revolving, like wheels in front of each other, & in front of my face, and it was 4 or 5 sittings ere she could get them fixed.”
Mind healers, faith healers, patent medicine salesman, all and more were the bane of the American Medical Association, which had been working to eliminate all such “quackery” since its formation in 1847. The AMA’s first official action was to forbid its members to refer patients to lay practitioners and anyone claiming to use homeopathic remedies. Its position was that only “scientific medicine,” the stuff taught in universities and practiced in hospitals, had any claim to legitimacy.
James was among many intellectuals, although few of them physicians, who found that view too restrictive. Another was Mark Twain, who characterized the medical establishment’s efforts to eliminate alternative cures as pure economics: “The objection is, people are curing people without a license and you [doctors] are afraid it will bust up business,” wrote the humorist. Twain contended that he could never get an honest answer from a licensed physician about alternatives, that it was “equivalent to going to Satan for information about Christianity.” He was cynical enough himself to discount many claims as exaggerated, even dangerous. But Twain argued that patients should have access to all choices of treatment: “I want liberty to do as I choose with my physical body.”
The insistence on scientific medicine, the ruthless effort to eliminate faith-based healing and other alternatives, paralleled the efforts of scientists to dust religious beliefs out of their methodology. James had never been easy with the idea that science should be so pure as to exclude all considerations of morality and philosophy. Neither did he embrace the “purification” of a single-approach practice of medicine.
Mind cures of the time featured a mix of relaxation techniques, hypnosis, and something then called “the talking cure,” which would later be adopted by psychiatric followers of Freud and win a reinstated legitimacy as “psychotherapy.” Mind healers might lack scientific rigor, James thought, but they were capable of insight: “The mind curers have made a great discovery—viz. that the health of soul and health of body hang together, and that if you get right, you get right all over by the same stroke.”
He suspected that the mind-body connection was far more potent than nineteenth-century medical practice was willing to acknowledge. James had mixed feelings about his own particular mind-cure regimen, especially its failure to ease his insomnia. “What boots it to be made unconsciously better, yet all the while consciously to lie awake o’nights as I still do?” he wrote. Yet he opposed efforts to turn practitioners like his “doctress” into criminals. As Massachusetts moved to outlaw unlicensed medicine over the next decade, James infuriated his fellow medical school graduates by arguing eloquently—if unsuccessfully—on behalf of mind-body therapy. He followed by proposing that his own field, psychology, should study the power of mind over physical health and the “mystical stratum of human nature.”
JAMES GAVE Phantasms of the Living one of its first positive reviews, and the only endorsement to appear in a mainstream research journal. His account appeared in Science on January 7, 1887, and began, “This is a most extraordinary work.” James went on to praise the intellect of the authors, their