by Paul J Croce
goals into practice with careful research on cell physiology and the influ-
ence of chemicals on living muscles and nerves. 16
In addition to the work of Bernard and Brown- Séquard, there were still
more inquiries in the German- speaking countries into the physiology that
would support medicine. In the 1840s, dissatisfaction with the speculative
insights of the idealistic, romantic Naturphilosophie school led to the rise of
systematic, laboratory- based science. These developments extended many
of the approaches of the Paris clinics. Despite the contrasts between clini-
cal and laboratory medicine, both shared materialist assumptions and thera-
peutic hopes. Both methods assumed the uniformity of disease states rather
than the specificity of disease conditions within individuals or emerging in
par tic u lar circumstances. The numerical method allowed the assemblage
of extensive cases to suggest probable causes from the actions of similar
conditions; clinical observations established correlations between body
parts and symptoms. Physiology added depth to the same princi ple; using
microscopic technology, laboratory researchers proposed such correlations
at the more refined cellular level. Laboratory techniques promised to fulfill
hopes spurred by clinical medicine that an exclusive focus on the material
substance of the body would produce healing insights. 17
German universities provided ample incentives for these inquiries with
extensive investment in laboratories and high expectations for the worth of
new knowledge from research. James’s trip in 1867 was at the beginning of
a great wave of American medical education in Germany: between the late
1860s and the early twentieth century, thousands of Americans studied
90 Young William James Thinking
medically related sciences in German- speaking laboratories; there were so
many, in fact, that some labs were even conducted in En glish. As doctors in
training increasingly shifted to laboratory rather than clinical training, the
advocates of each approach thought of themselves as scientific, even as the
evolution of cutting- edge medicine in each era was toward the identifica-
tion of the most scientific, with the microsystem best understood at the time;
they shared the scientific commitment to bottom-up causation, with the
clinicians attending to par tic u lar organs, and then the laboratory research-
ers evaluating cellular functions presented as the cause of medical symp-
toms. The trend in nineteenth- century scientific medicine, in degrees through
the clinic- and laboratory- focused periods, was toward analy sis of discrete
parts rather than the whole person, and toward the concomitant specializa-
tion into subdisciplines to deal thoroughly with those parts. Both clinic and
laboratory encouraged the understanding of diseases as uniform entities
rather than as specific conditions of sick people with individual distinctive-
ness. These trends in medicine immediately coincided with the direction of
professionalizing science in general— toward working assumptions for the
exclusively materialist substance of things, their uniform operation accord-
ing to universal laws, and their mechanical interaction.
Despite these strides in scientific pro gress, German physiology by the
1860s, like French clinical medicine, had few actual therapeutic innovations
to show for all its scientific insights. The achievements were in analy sis of the
tissues— leading, in medical terms, to improvements in diagnosis, not thera-
peutics. The promise that science would provide for improved healing, how-
ever, was a compelling hope, especially for younger students and prac ti tion ers
in the field, such as William James. This context put regular medical prac ti-
tion ers into a paradoxical situation: they looked ahead with great hope for
improvement, but felt immediate short- term frustration. In the long run,
their stance would look visionary to supporters of scientific medicine, but in
the middle of the nineteenth century, they offered only promissory notes.
James combined that same scientific frustration and faith in the future for
his own career path when he declared in 1867 that “the time has come for
Psy chol ogy to begin to be a science.” 18
James’s Physiological Germany
James found support for these scientific hopes in Germany, but science was
not his exclusive focus. He sailed for Eu rope in April 1867 and spent the
summer in Paris, Bohemia, and Dresden. He read widely outside his work
Between Scientific and Sectarian Medicine 91
in medicine and the physiology of mind, and he repeatedly visited water-
cure baths for his per sis tent back prob lems and depressed mood. Ralph
Waldo Emerson even wrote a letter of introduction to ease his way into the
German intellectual world, boasting that this “student of medicine [is a] val-
ued companion,” traveling “with a view to the further prosecution of his
studies.” As fall approached, James was eager to take on more serious stud-
ies, so he was determined “this winter to stick to the study of the ner vous
system and psy chol ogy.” He was identifying medical fields that would allow
him to engage in research supporting prac ti tion ers’ needs for new knowl-
edge enabling improvement of diagnosis and eventually therapy. 19 Medi-
cine’s promissory notes appealed strongly to the son of Henry James as he
eagerly anticipated the philanthropic possibilities for science. Despite his
avocational pursuits and the distractions of poor health, James’s major goal
during 1867 was to work with leading lights in physiological psy chol ogy by
attending lectures and joining in laboratory work.
James’s hopes were high, but his back and eye prob lems kept him from
laboratory work, so he feared that “[m]edecine is busted, much to my sor-
row.” Still, he went to Berlin in September 1867, lived near the university,
and stayed with his plan to absorb the new scientific knowledge. By this
time, he felt stronger and more confident after the water cures, and so he
said, “I have got tolerably well to work, & enjoy my lectures at the university
intensely.” He systematically began to “attend all the lectures on physiology
that are given there.” Most notably, that meant immersing himself in the
work of physiologist Emil du Bois- Reymond; James found him “an irascible
man of about forty- five [who] gives a very good and clear, yea, brilliant, se-
ries of five lectures a week.” Caught up in the spirit of his studies, he soon
declared, “I am going on to study what is already known, and perhaps may
be able to do some work at it”— that is, his own laboratory investigations. His
professor was urging a transition in psy chol ogy away from speculation about
mental states. James had heard and read enough to know that “some mea-
sure ments have allready [ sic] been made in the region lying between the
physical changes in the nerves and the appearance of consciousness,” namely
in the pioneering laboratory work of Johannes Müller, Gustav Fechner, and
Ernst Weber. Müller developed the theory of specific nerve energies, identif
y-
ing specific nerve activities with par tic u lar sensory experiences. This was an
essential precursor to Fechner and Weber’s psychophysics, which offered the
possibility for quantifying mental life in correspondence to bodily change,
with the proposition that the intensity of perceived sensations increased
92 Young William James Thinking
with physical stimulus, but only logarithmically— that is, by diminishing
increments. This work both addressed James’s hope to shed light on the
influence of the physical on the mental and provided his first substantial ex-
posure to probabilistic thinking, which was embedded in its methods. De-
spite its materialist implications and applications, psychophysics, especially
as presented by Fechner, was a mechanical proposition as a step toward un-
derstanding the “inner psychophysics” of the body’s relation to mind, with
a hope actually to undercut materialism. 20 These calculations and proposi-
tions were more widely used, however, to support views about regular pat-
terns in nature as steps toward establishing the mea sur able research pro-
grams that made experimental scientific psy chol ogy pos si ble.
Du Bois- Reymond had studied with Müller, and his own research on
animal electricity was built on the work of Hermann von Helmholtz, a
physicist and physiologist at Heidelberg in whose laboratory James hoped
to work. Du Bois- Reymond used physics models and methods to establish a
picture of “the interior of the muscle” with “centers of electromotive action.”
He thought of these hy po thet i cal “electromotive molecules” by analogy
with the “action of a voltaic pile surrounded by a layer of moist conducting
substance,” portraying the electrical action in a muscle as a series of evenly
rowed electrically charged balls. He concluded that “ these experiments jus-
tify the assumption that in the muscles an electrical arrangement obtains
similar to that . . . described” in the models used in physics. Using methods
that also assumed the ability to explain physiology in terms of physics,
Helmholtz mea sured the speed of a nerve impulse in a frog. He found that
the impulses operate at the very worldly speed of fifty meters per second,
even slower than the speed of sound; this tangible mea sure ment dashed the
long- standing idealistic assumption that nerve impulses were instanta-
neous or uncountably fast. These insights were triumphs of scientific re-
search and persuasive arguments for materialist philosophies, which have
become the basis for modern mainstream textbook models of the mechani-
cal operation of currents through the axons of the ner vous system at speeds
much slower than familiar electrical transmissions. 21
These German scientists were mapping out a scientific basis for psy chol-
ogy that would wrest understanding of the mind’s operation away from phil-
osophical assumptions, which had dominated the study of the mind. More
specifically, du Bois- Reymond and Helmholtz, along with Ernst Brücke and
Karl Ludwig were all students of Müller in their twenties in the 1840s, and
they signed a pact written by du Bois- Reymond to insist on materialist ex-
Between Scientific and Sectarian Medicine 93
Emil du Bois- Reymond’s Model for Cells Depicting the “ imagined . . . centres of
electromotive molecules.”
Du Bois- Reymond, On Animal Electricity, 109–10.
James’s physiology teacher in Berlin during winter 1867–68, du Bois- Reymond
presented the human body in starkly material terms, with these molecules depicted
in neat rows, on the model of particles in physics. This simplified and frankly
“ imagined” assumption contrasted with James’s emerging recognition of the robust
complexity of natu ral facts, the basis of his hope for a “Program of the Future of
Science” (CWJ, 4:93–94).
planations. To “this truth” of the materialist outlook, they all “pledged a sol-
emn oath.” They proposed that “no forces other than the common physical-
chemical ones are active within the organism.” Their depiction of the future
coincided with the scientific hopes of mainstream medicine, just as their
work supplied information and theories to support those hopes. They ded-
icated themselves to “physical- mathematical methods,” and if explana-
tions still eluded, they proposed “to assume new forces equal in dignity to
94 Young William James Thinking
the chemical- physical forces inherent in matter.” Following the princi ple
that the elegant simplicity of physics provided the best model, they as-
sumed that ever more aspects of life, most dramatically human mental life,
were indeed “reducible to the forces of attraction and repulsion”; James
would again meet this impulse to “physicalize a whole array of human
mental powers” in the work of British psychologist Alexander Bain, whose
work he would study in the Metaphysical Club. James showed his reserva-
tions about the stark implications of these materialist directions shortly
after finding an apartment while attending du Bois- Reymond’s lectures: he
reported that after the lectures, he would return “to this lone room where
no human com pany but a ghastly lithograph of Johannes Müller and a grin-
ning skull are to cheer me.” James was showing a backhanded anticipation
of his “ Will to Believe,” where he defended “precursive faith” in contrast
with scientific skepticism; in 1867, however, he was encountering a will to
believe among scientists advocating materialism prior to evidence for medi-
cal effectiveness because they “tacitly assumed that there may be [such] a
Philosophy.” In the 1860s, James also directed his critique at Herbert Spen-
cer, whose steadfast empirical focus in support of materialist assumptions
he called “pure E[mpiricism],” in reference to his evolutionist philosophy
exclusively in support of scientific empiricism; his later use of the very same
phrase, but with “pure experience” then pulled away from its association
with materialist science, shows his per sis tent eagerness to pres ent his
own hopes for science without assuming such materialist reduction. 22 Even
with his critiques and exploratory phrasing, James fully recognized that
despite their excesses, these grand expectations for science, when applied
to medicine and psy chol ogy, might produce impor tant new insights.
Du Bois- Reymond fully applied the terms of his materialist oath to the
major scientific innovation of the era: Darwinism was the latest develop-
ment in science to “dispel the illusion[s]” of philosophy and religion. Dar-
win’s “ultimate triumph” was to pres ent the law of species change through
natu ral se lection as a “mechanical pro cess.” Du Bois- Reymond’s views of
Darwinism and medical physiology were an extension of his “physicalist”
views that coincided with the arguments of Auguste Comte about human
pro gress toward positivist understanding through science. The German
physiologist similarly maintained that science was at the root of civilization’s
improvements in each age: “[P]rogress necessarily depends on consci
ous
utilization of natu ral forces observed in their orderly workings.” Modern
civilization has done more than advance from the structures of previous
Between Scientific and Sectarian Medicine 95
ages; with science, du Bois- Reymond added forcefully, humanity has “awak-
ened as it were from a bewildering dream.” He was, however, eager to give
credit to Chris tian ity in this story. Despite the roadblocks to scientific knowl-
edge that it and religion in general have imposed on the human mind, he
insisted, the Christian religion planted the seed for the certainties of scien-
tific knowledge by “inspiring man with the ardent longing for absolute knowl-
edge”; he argued with an early version of Robert Merton’s thesis, because of
its uncompromising spirit of mono the ism, which displaced the “essentially
tolerant” beliefs of polytheism. But any religious idea was at best a way sta-
tion toward the pinnacle of “certitude in . . . experimental science. ”23
Despite his reservations about such enthusiasms for science, James saw
the practical benefit of adding deeper scientific understanding to his medi-
cal training. So it is “worth the trou ble,” he noted with patient ac cep tance
of scientific overconfidence, and he added with determination, “a steady
boring away is bound to fetch” eventual accomplishment. While he rarely
showed hesitation about the worth of the scientific material, he found it
“very discouraging” that his poor health kept him from researching more of
the alluring work he was reading about. As he well understood, to really
succeed in scientific research would require expertise in the laboratory, but
his back and eye prob lems kept him from these firsthand inquiries. “My
wish was to study physiology practically,” he wrote in September 1867, but
then added gloomily, “I shall not be able. ”24
Despite his shaky health, James said, “I find myself getting more inter-
ested in Physiology,” as he kept learning the field in lectures and books, even
if not in laboratories. When his symptoms would temporarily improve, he
“nourish[ed] a hope that I may be able to make its study (and perhaps its
teaching) my profession.” And back and forth he went, studying hard in his