by Paul J Croce
chosen field, which set back his health, then resting long enough— often at
water- cure establishments—to build up energy for more study. Throughout
his German stay, he maintained the central vocational commitment that had
driven him since the early 1860s: “[M]y only ideal of life is a scientific life,”
since without such work “I should feel as if all value had departed fm. my
life.” Even beyond the philanthropic hope he shared with his father, James
adopted some of the visionary hopes of scientific enthusiasts; for example,
he expected that “an instantaneous transportation of the physical man, to
any distance for any time, is one of the desiderata wh. science is bound some
day to satisfy.” His “program of future science” would include such enthu-
siasms, which had no necessary link to reductionist science, and would
96 Young William James Thinking
support science not wedded to materialism. This par tic u lar hope for speedy
transportation may have also been an impulse born of his long separation
from home. But as long as he was ensconced in Eu rope, he was eager to
“study what is already known” in physiological psy chol ogy; and he hoped to
work directly with “[Hermann von] Helmholtz & . . . [Wilhelm] Wundt at
Heidelberg [who] are working at it. ”25 Setting his sights high, he knew where
to turn for the pioneering work in the new psy chol ogy.
After another month of reading and lectures, James showed his scien-
tific commitment in stating sharply that “I shall hate myself till I get doing
some special work . . . [with] Helmholtz and Wundt.” Even if he could work
in their laboratories, he knew that “my ultimate prospects are pretty hazy.”
He was dedicated to “the border ground of physiology & psy chol ogy, over-
lapping both.” In the con temporary professional climate, he knew that “a
cultivator thereof can make no money,” and yet he maintained his hope that
had sharpened during the Civil War for some “philanthropy” or “human-
ism”—namely, the moral hope to contribute to human welfare through his
scientific work. In the middle of his Eu ro pean stay, he declared “much wd. I
give for a constructive passion of some kind”; perhaps, if he could “get working
at Physiology,” this could serve as the practical outlet for his philanthropic
hopes. He was convinced that “ there is work there for . . . psy chol ogy,” but
only after “some as yet unforeseen steps are made in the physiology of the
Ner vous system.” And so, he declared his vocational purpose as a minor
drama: “[I]f I were able by assiduous pottering to define a few physiological
facts however humble I shd. feel I had not lived entirely in vain. ”26
During his year and a half in Germany, James learned a lot of science,
but he never did work with Helmholtz or Wundt, because, he repeatedly
complained, poor health and his own ambivalent lack of confidence kept
him from their laboratories. The combination of his scientific ideals and
his trou bles made him intensely frustrated: he si mul ta neously felt a great
vocational drive to do the laboratory work central to his science and yet
also inhibited from engaging in this very work himself. As a consequence,
he spent his last few months in Eu rope with lingering but fading hopes for
taking up laboratory research, while often writing home with worry about
spending the family money.27 His poor health still stood in the way of his
vocational goals, so he spent many of the fall months at the end of his so-
journ at water cures. His frustrations prodded his avid reading of physio-
logical medicine, while, ironically, he sought remedy from use of sectarian
therapies.
Between Scientific and Sectarian Medicine 97
At Least a Medical Degree
Upon arriving back in Cambridge in the fall of 1868, James realized that al-
though he still did not want to practice medicine, he was close to earning
the degree. Despite the years in Brazil and Germany, and while fulfilling his
primary goal of learning nerve physiology, he had assembled more than
three years of regular medical training and now only needed to write the
thesis and take the final exams. Although his health was still poor and his
spirits low, which made him feel he was living a “setting hen existence,” he
focused on completing his medical degree. He almost surprised himself at
how much he liked it. Perhaps it was “so in ter est ing” to him because it in-
tersected with the physiology he had studied in Eu rope. In Germany, he
was learning with a “balloon like detachment,” with little connection to any
institution and without a very clear career path. Back in Cambridge, he was
earning a degree in a well- defined field while still fueling his interest in phys-
iology. Shortly after his return from Eu rope, he felt “well on the rise again.”
This “short taste of comparative wellness has given me new stomach . . . for
the fight,” and he directed that vigor into completing his regular medical
studies. He still felt that his health held him back, so he opted for exams in
June rather than March of 1869, and he needed that postponement since in
that earlier month, “my bottom rather fell out,” as he said without specifying
which of his prob lems was at issue. During this season, he chose his thesis
topic, one that would not require laboratory investigations—at least none be-
yond the living laboratory of his water- cure experiences on the physiological
effects of cold. Adopting a slow but steady pace of work, he completed the
thesis, and he passed his oral exams on schedule in June.28
James kept his scientific ideals while finishing his medical degree but
still worried that ill health would keep him from laboratory research. Writ-
ing to his friend Henry Bowditch, who was thriving in just the kind of re-
search work that James was longing to do at this point, he declared that
“purely scientific study . . . [is] the only satisfying work.” And he urged on his
healthier friend: “Go in old boy and drink deep [and] I, for one will promise
to read yea, and believe in, all your researches.” Compared to Bowditch’s
laboratory work, James did the complementary work of attending lectures
and “read[in]g every thing imaginable in Eng., Germ., & French” in medical
physiology, even though his own career goal of work in psy chol ogy was still
out of reach. Medical research and writing, serving as a conduit from labo-
ratory knowledge to medical practice, seemed a plausible vocation. So, in a
98 Young William James Thinking
moment of optimistic planning, he blurted out to Bowditch “I’ll tell you what
let’s do! Set up a partnership, you to run and attend to the patients.” For his
part, James would keep at his studies, which he would “distil[l] . . . in con-
centrated form into [Bowditch’s] mind.” While this was a good forecast of
the future relations in scientific medicine between researcher and practi-
tioner, and an equally good forecast of James’s own work of summary and
synthesis of the field of scientific psy chol ogy in The Princi ples (1890), there
were as yet no
social structures to support such work, even as Bowditch’s
own appointment in 1871 to teach physiology full time at Harvard Medical
School would point to coming trends.29
James applied the spirit of his enthusiastic proposal for distilling the in-
sights of physiological research for the work of doctors in practice with his
more sober hope for earning “a precarious and needy living by doing work
for medical periodicals.” He had started to develop his writing portfolio
with his reviews, which indeed involved mostly works in sciences related to
medicine. Without his own laboratory work, this career path felt second
best; yet this was also how he was writing his medical thesis, by “just
compil[ing] what I find in books.” Despite his somber assessment, James
was actually building up a talent that would bloom later. His greatest
achievements were not in the laboratory but as a synthesizer of research—
Alfred North Whitehead called James one of the great “assemblers” in the
history of philosophy. The young scientist was already showing a talent for
teasing out the implications of ranges of specific scientific investigations for
vivid expression of their insights in concise form. He demonstrated his
strengths in learning and synthesizing when he wrote to Bowditch that he
had “read your [Harvard medical] thesis with much satisfaction,” but also
with substantial criticism, including doubts about “the frequency of pulsa-
tion & blood- pressure” when the “spinal cord was galvanized.” On the basis
of his studies with Emil du Bois- Reymond, who proposed that the nerves
act with electrical discharges, James was debating with Bowditch about
the qualities of electrical current in the ner vous system, and galvanization
was a way to apply electrical stimulation artificially for experimental pur-
poses. After James received his own medical degree, he kept up his reading,
urging Bowditch “to tell me of any bibliographic news of consequence either
in the physio- or the psycho- logic lines”— with his word play showing his
sharpening interest in the relation of body and mind. 30
For all of James’s learning in cutting- edge physiology, his scientific edu-
cation in some ways lacked institutional rigor. During the 1860s, while he
Between Scientific and Sectarian Medicine 99
was a student, Harvard Medical School professor James Clark White avidly
endorsed reforms to require laboratory understanding of physiology as a
prerequisite to clinical practice. Advocates for these reforms argued that,
with science, doctors would understand chemical reactions in the body and
the physiological actions of drugs as power ful tools to accompany the clini-
cal assessment of symptoms at bedside. White’s influence was checked by
older faculty, especially Oliver Wendell Holmes, Se nior, and Henry Jacob
Bigelow. They were skeptical about the therapeutic value of laboratory
work, especially since even its advocates had little yet to show for all their
promise.
Holmes had created a stir of controversy when he endorsed the “nature-
trusting heresy,” the idea that doctors could do little to correct ill health
and that it was better to let nature do the healing. He even declared that, “if
the whole materia medica [medical drugs], as now used, could be sunk to the
bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind,— and all the worse
for the fishes.” Bigelow, whose father was a leading advocate of such “self-
limiting” qualities in diseases, added criticism of laboratory promises because
such physiology was too reductionist and impersonal. These doctors ar-
gued that the study of experimental science was tangential to the real work
of healing—or often just a sideshow to the body’s own healing. The labora-
tory reforms received a boost, however, when Charles Eliot, after teaching
chemistry at the Lawrence Scientific School and at the Mas sa chu setts In-
stitute of Technology, returned to Harvard as president in 1869; with his
endorsement, the re sis tance to laboratory medicine collapsed. In addition,
Eliot insisted on a more demanding schedule: the academic terms were
more than doubled, and the requirements for graduation were ratcheted up
from two to three years of study, with more attention to grading in written
examinations and with a strong emphasis on experimental science. 31
The demand for rigor was on the rise, with German laboratory science
generally the model. Although James graduated before the advent of the
changes at Harvard, he had already reaped his own version of these reforms
during his trip to Germany. Describing the state of medical education in 1869,
James’s own son, Henry James III, told a story that has become canonical
about the informality of his father’s medical examination, with James re-
sponding favorably to one factual question from Holmes, who then simply
stopped the questioning in favor of a friendly chat. James III selectively
presented the story to emphasize Charles Eliot’s transformative profession-
alizing impact for a biography of the Harvard president more than sixty
100 Young William James Thinking
years after the event. The story began when William James himself, age
sixty- five, exaggerated his own experience to amuse and encourage his stu-
dents. The full examination was indeed more “laissez faire” than later stan-
dards, as James III emphasized, but it also included “a case to be reported
on at the dispensary and . . . written work to be handed in.” Despite the in-
formal atmosphere, the examination also included thorough demands in
many areas of medicine, and James was especially well prepared to display
his extensive knowledge in the parts of medicine related to his own educa-
tional purposes. By 1869, he was convinced that he would not practice med-
icine anyway, but the degree would be the means to the end of furthering
his desire to learn in the sciences adjunct to medicine. And so before the
exam, Bowditch counseled James, “[D]on[’]t let the Doctors bully you” with
their own specialized questions; “if they try any game of that sort,” his
friend continued in recognition of James’s learning in physiology, “knock
them down with some of Helmholtz’s latest views. ”32 Even without the in-
stitutional structures that were coming with Eliot’s reforms, James had
already taken on rigorous scientific study.
In the 1860s, as James studied physiology and related sciences, and
trained in medicine, he was guided by his program for future science,
which pulled his thinking away from both his father’s expectations and
reductionist materialist inquiry. During his medical studies, James in-
sisted, “I don’t want to break off connexion with biological science,” but he
also kept looking for discovery of deeper “reason” in life, hoping to get “en
rapport with reason,” as he expressed his interest in nonmaterial factors.
This was in part a philosophical impulse, for deeper understanding of
meanings and implications in scientific theories and more, but it was also a
medical impulse. 33 Before, during, and after his schooling in
mainstream
medicine, James’s inquisitive interests led him to the use of alternative
therapies. The prac ti tion ers of these therapies also sought deeper reasons
within nature, while also retaining aspects of science. Throughout his own
engagement with sectarian medicine, James never broke off his connec-
tion with mainstream science even as he explored alternative worlds of
healing.
Va ri e ties of Sectarian Medicine
While William James was attending to his professional education in scien-
tific medicine and considering its limits, the field of medicine experienced a
range of competing theories and practices, and many of them resonated
Between Scientific and Sectarian Medicine 101
with his critique of reductionist materialism. While Harvard medicine be-
came increasingly scientific with emphasis on clinical practice and labora-
tory training, alternative methods proliferated and would endure. These
medical sects collectively went by the names “irregulars,” “unorthodox,” or
simply “sectarians,” although many regular physicians were eager to call all
the irregulars “quacks” because of their departure from scientific (and reli-
gious) norms. Part of their unorthodox appeal was practical, because of the
sparse therapeutic improvement stemming from scientific medicine. Sectar-
ians could also pres ent themselves as more “natu ral” than the mainstream,
which was a particularly striking and effective contrast when bloodletting
from lancets or leaches and harsh mineral drugs were widely used to com-
bat ill health and purge the body of disease. But their appeal was also on a
deeper level that would apply even in contrast with mainstream medicine
once it would evolve past those therapies into the era of biomedicine. A con-
sistency in regular medicine, from before to after its surge in scientific thera-
peutics, was that nature alone, including the body’s natu ral healing power,
was unreliable, and therefore contrasting agents and actions were needed
to achieve and maintain health. While mainstream doctors with the “nature-
trusting heresy” remained a distinct minority, sectarians extended this chal-
lenge to the mainstream still further by including trust in the healing powers
within each person. However, the predominant antagonism to sectarian