by Paul J Croce
James did not refer to neurasthenia for assertion of hierarchy, and its
narrative did not dampen his ambitions, but the diagnosis offered an expla-
nation about how they stayed out of his reach. During the first years of his
scientific studies, he had already worried about the ill effects of such brain
Between Scientific and Sectarian Medicine 125
work on his physical and mental health. In 1866 James used this type of
thinking to make a modest but firm resolution for “narrowing and deepen-
ing the channel of my intellectual activity, [for] economizing my feeble en-
ergies” by focusing on medicine. Despite his intentions, he still frequently
depleted his energy. With his hard work and specialized intensity, James
was fully engaging the focused attention that Beard pointed to as the trig-
ger to ner vous exhaustion; and yet, James was also beginning to notice the
importance of attention’s “narrowness of consciousness” for steering through
“the mass of incoming currents,” as he explained in his later psy chol ogy.
The very burdens within a crucial mental trait raised the significance of
Beard’s emphasis on the need for personal recharge, which James applied
with calls to balance American society’s “gospel of work” with a “gospel of
rest,” including time at water cures. James would use a similar phrase in his
1899 essay, “The Gospel of Relaxation,” but at age thirty- one he was already
evaluating the place of overwork and other social factors as sources of med-
ical symptoms in one of his first essays, on the importance of “Vacations” in
1873. The neurasthenic diagnosis appealed to James not only because of his
own experiences with its symptoms and his own rest cures using hydropa-
thy but also because it mingled mental and physical symptoms in intimate
interaction. James referred to neurasthenia and its evaluations many times,
including indirect references to this diagnosis in his descriptions of mental
drift and loss of will in his psy chol ogy texts, a frank report in 1895 that “I am
a victim of neurasthenia and the sense of hollowness and unreality that
goes with it,” and in 1904, when remembering an “acute neurasthenic at-
tack” in his youth. In addition, the very method of neurasthenic analy sis
offered a potential resource for his philosophy. Neurasthenia was a diagno-
sis about the use of tissues rather than their structures, just as pragmatism
would emphasize the consequences or use of ideas, and in his radical em-
piricism, James would evaluate consciousness as a function rather than a
structural component of the mind.70 Although by the twentieth century
neurasthenia was bypassed in favor of diagnoses more selective and spe-
cialized, neurasthenia played an impor tant role not only in James’s times
generally but also in his understanding of himself and even as a vehicle for
his own theorizing.
Neurasthenic treatments had appeal both to alternative prac ti tion ers for
addressing the whole person and to the mainstream for the promise of
physical resolution of par tic u lar health prob lems. Similarly, James felt mo-
tivation to use electrical therapies both from sectarian practices and from
126 Young William James Thinking
the materialist “electro- physiology” of du Bois- Reymond. Before the advent
of bacteriology, mainstream medicine resided alongside competing claims
for health care, just as James practiced sectarian medicine while studying
German physiology and Harvard medicine. His circulation through diff er-
ent medical theories and practices pres ents a microcosm of the interacting
marketplace of medical approaches in the early to middle nineteenth century,
and he drew inspiration from each side. He sympathized with sectarians
but distanced himself from wholly immaterial notions of the “vital force”;
far from dismissing this central princi ple of nonmainstream thinking, he
insisted, with an early version of his functional pro cess thinking, that it
was “not a generator but only a transformer of external force.” While scien-
tists likewise distanced themselves from such nonmaterialist thinking to
pres ent physical descriptions for all of life, James was comfortable with
mystery enduring even within his science; and yet like his teacher du Bois-
Reymond, he agreed that life required a physical basis. “Be life what it may,”
James insisted in the robust language of materialist medicine, it surely
involved the “potential of so much fat or muscle capable of being manifested
by oxidation in the form of external heat or motion.” Despite this insistence
on natu ral facts, his deep reservations about the reductionism of material-
ism would directly parallel the sectarian critique of mainstream medicine
for ignoring the whole person. He enlisted this same combination of fidelity
to physical facts and avoidance of their reduction to physical traits for his
opening argument in The Va ri e ties (1902). The “medical materialism” he
had met in his studies became the derogatory label for shortsightedness of
scientific explanations that would not look beyond physical attributes to ex-
plain human mind and be hav ior. 71
James’s study of medicine included both the laboratory evidence of anat-
omy and physiology and sectarian experiences that could not be reduced to
laboratory evaluation. While most observers have assumed the sharp con-
trasts of these practices, for James they would become diff er ent resources
for his thinking about the human person, in medicine and more. From his
work in mainstream medicine and his scientific studies in general, he ap-
proached the sectarians with an inquiring curiosity, ready to try out practices
in experience, but skeptical of extravagant claims. From his exposure to
sectarian medicine, he harbored insights about the power of nature and the
limits of mainstream medicine, and about the possibilities for nature to act
in ways that could not be reduced to physical and chemical terms. Even as
he became an impor tant leader and synthesizer of the new scientific psy-
Between Scientific and Sectarian Medicine 127
chol ogy, these suggestions contributed to his doubts about the finality of
scientific approaches.
James did not work in irregular medicine any more than in mainstream
medicine, but he did personally try a pluralistic range of therapies through-
out his life, from his visits to water cures and his use of electrical therapy in
his youth to his enlisting of many treatments, including homeopathic rem-
edies, the mind cure of Christian Science, the lymph compound, and lesser
known remedies, as he sought relief from angina and “arterial trou bles” in
his later years. In addition, he enlisted his reputation to serve in defense of
those engaged in sectarian practice. In 1874, while launching his career in
psy chol ogy, he endorsed hydropathy in a book review of a physiology text,
extolling the preventive powers of water- cure practices. In 1894, when the
Mas sa chu setts legislature was reviewing a bill restricting the practice of
medicine to the work of allopaths, he wrote a vigorous critique of the bill.
Although he agreed that the irregulars were unorthodox, he observed that
“their facts are patent and startling,” so he felt it was a misuse of science to
impede these experiences because they could not (yet) be explained scien-
tifically. Instead, he hoped that “during the next generation” researchers
would discover a “clearer interpretation of all such phenomena”; he was
tapping his own youthful hope for a program of future science, just as main-
stream medicine hoped for the diagnostic benefits of laboratory research.
James had used his thesis topic on the effect of cold to explore the claims of
water cures, and now he treated the alternative practices as a first stage
toward greater scientific understanding. But the turn from private writing
to public statement challenging a mainstream norm was not easy: “I never
did anything that required as much moral effort in my life.” This was one of
the first of many steps that he would take toward applying his convictions
publicly on still more topics. 72
When another bill came forward in 1898, it was indeed less restrictive
than the one in 1894. James’s critique, especially since he could bring the
weight of his Harvard affiliation, had had an impact, but the change was
also in response to the growing influence of the Christian Science Church
in the 1890s. The later law would create a board of medical registration to
oversee rather than explic itly regulate, and one section of the bill exempted
mind- cure healers, provided they did not call themselves doctors. James
stepped forward, this time addressing the legislature in person. He again
pointed to “an enormous mass of experience, both of homeopathic doctors
and their patients,” that suggested “the efficacy of these remedies,” and he
128 Young William James Thinking
chided the regular profession, which “stands firm in its belief that such ex-
perience is worthless.” He was applying his own philosophical stand for an
empiricism that would include all natu ral experiences, in realms conven-
tionally called material or immaterial. In addition, directly anticipating his
critique the next year of the widespread tendency to ignore or malign human
differences in “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” he called the pro-
fessional mainstream “partly blind” because its policy effectively declares,
regarding experiences outside of habitual channels, “[G]ive me ignorance
rather than knowledge”; with “blindness of this type,” members of the med-
ical profession “not only permit but even compel each other to be shallow.”
And yet James was calling his fellow M.D.s only partly blind; he praised
their specialized knowledge and acknowledged the difficulties for “any set
of prac ti tion ers” in moving beyond “ignoran[ce] of all practice but their
own.” He explained with a brief and wistful version of his attention to the
mystery in the full array of experience: the whole field of medicine is indeed
“overwhelmingly great.” In the same year, he delivered his psychological
preface to pragmatism, observing the “trackless forest of human experi-
ence” through which concepts and theories blaze trails useful but not all
knowing. In the same way, he was not content to remain in medical igno-
rance but hoped for a future science that would investigate a whole range of
health experiences, mainstream and more.73
In 1898 James also acknowledged that “when I was a medical student, . . .
we had to sneer at homeopathy by word of command”; so he “would have
been ashamed to be caught looking into a homoeopathic book”— even though
he did this and more. As a student, he kept his openness to alternatives hidden
behind the “shield [of] respectability” of his scientific schooling, as he ex-
pressed when preparing his review of Thomas Huxley in 1865. Later, how-
ever, he blurted it out, declaring in 1903: “I know homeopathic remedies are
not inert, as orthodox medicine insists they neccessarily [ sic] must be.” He
even supported sectarian treatment for some specialized conditions: “[T]o
the victims of spinal paralysis,” he insisted, “the homeopathic treatment . . .
really does good.” He did not want homeopathy or any sectarian medicine
to displace the mainstream, but he believed it had a place in healing, espe-
cially to address cases that allopaths found elusive; specialized scientific
work simply could not address all the multiple sources of such health condi-
tions, which were particularly well suited to holistic approaches: “I always
believed that homeopathy should get a fair trial in obstinate chronic cases. ”74
Between Scientific and Sectarian Medicine 129
He found his alternative therapies to be most effective in management of
symptoms, even when they could not cure.
Even when quietly considering alternative healing practices during his
study of mainstream medicine in 1868, he insisted, “[T]ake the remedy so
long as it heals, [ because] there should no more be an aristocracy of reme-
dies than of physicians.” This demo cratic impulse in James reflected the
“curapathy” of the nineteenth- century marketplace of healing practices.
This tacit pragmatism would be the same method of openness to diverse
philosophical impulses that he would articulate toward the end of his youth
in “The Sentiment of Rationality” (1879) and would embed in his mature
theories, in which he paraphrased his 1868 call for medical pluralism by
observing that his pluralistic pragmatism would bring an “alteration in ‘the
seat of authority,’ ” generating a philosophy “more like a federal republic
than like an empire or a kingdom.” In practicing what he preached, his
therapies, like his philosophizing, were designed for healthy guidance; so
his hope, even when discouraged by his youthful trou bles, to find more
“therapeutic arrows in my quiver,” was at once a statement of his medical
therapies and a meta phor for his theories in formation. 75 He fully acknowl-
edged the strengths in current mainstream medical practice: its scientific
tools directed attention to natu ral facts and brought great improvements in
diagnosis; and its bold procedures were at their best in dealing with acute
and definite prob lems, even if they were less effective in elusive and chronic
cases. His early private reflections supporting naturalism without reduc-
tion to materialism in medicine would bloom into a keynote of his whole
philosophy.
Toward the end of his life, James went to homeopaths regularly. In
March 1909, he made a point of saying that that the homeopathic doctor
James Taylor was not “a quack,” as if he honestly thought some of them
might be (or that others might think so), but he was impressed that his prac-
tice had “rejuvenated” a number of friends. True to the indirect and subtle
nature of the remedy’s impact, it required “frightful patience,” but through
the discipline of the “doctor’s orders,” he was able to “write my Oxford lec-
tures,” delivered in May of 1908 and published as A Pluralistic Universe (1909).
When he first began the treatm
ents, James experienced “no results . . . but
exacerbation.” Although these homeopathic aggravations, like the crises of
water cure, were frustrating, he was deeply familiar with the pro cess: this,
of course, is “just what [Taylor] expects at first.” The doctor prescribed
130 Young William James Thinking
“homeopathic pellets 6 times a day” along with a mixture of therapies in-
cluding “ ‘vibration’ along the spine, . . . ‘high frequency’ electricity,” and
“inhalations of a certain vapor,” showing his affiliation with the low-
potency homeopaths ready to compromise with mainstream medicine.
James admired the sectarian practice for its ability to illuminate the natu-
ral facts of his health, saying that he liked the doctor’s “extraordinarily
shrewd perceptions” about “the dynamics of the human machine.” In keep-
ing with the promise of nonmainstream medicine, Taylor helped him to
manage his symptoms by directing the therapies to James’s whole constitu-
tional framework; the visits also reinforced his own belief in the power of
“exercise [which] after all does improve the quality and fibre of one[’s] tone.”
In October, James tried another homeopathic doctor, John Madison Taylor
(no relation to the first), whose prescriptions illustrated the mingling of mo-
dalities: calomel (a harsh allopathic remedy), but in a small dose (according
to homeopathy), on the theory that it would induce purging of impurities
(in the spirit of herbal emetics). While these remedies and healthful habits
did not produce a final cure, he happily reported that they improved the
“quality of one’s work”; learning to cope with trou bles to enable taking ac-
tion would have urgency in his old age just it had in his youth. 76
Because alternative medicine would address the whole person rather
than only an acute prob lem, treatment that enabled James to complete his
writing was embedded in a larger, holistic remedy picture. He realized that
these homeopathic visits were directed toward “re- educat[ing] me as to my
general way of holding myself in the current of life.” James Taylor did not
address prob lems in par tic u lar body parts but rather “the ‘pitch’ at which a
man lives”; he readily accepted the doctor’s constitutional portrayal of