Mind cure

"...mind cure and the crop of pseudoscientific interventions that materialized contemporaneously (“hydropathies, diet fads, homeopathies, mesmerisms, hypnotisms”) were “acceptable neither to science nor to church,” as Meyer writes. Their unacceptability was precisely the point. Neurotics were tired of contending with a liberal Protestantism that called suffering congregants to feats of manly self-discipline, and they were no less tired of an impotent medical establishment bent on dismissing their problems as fictions.

Many doctors in the 1860s and ’70s were staunch materialists, unwilling to countenance the existence of diseases that left no detectable traces. Others understood “nervous disorders” as regrettable but inevitable by-products of modernity and its ceaseless exhaustions. In his 1881 treatise, American Nervousness, pioneering neurologist George Beard anticipated much of the self-help dialectic to come, identifying society as the problem and proposing personal improvement as the solution. “Confronted by an imbalance between two terms”—the self and civilization—“one could modify one or the other, or both,” writes Meyer. But not for a moment did [Beard] mean to be attacking civilization. He drew no romantic inferences. He had no political or social therapies to propose. In effect, Beard assumed that “modern civilization” was what it was; nothing was to be done about it.

In this tacit isolation of therapy from society, of health from politics, he was offering nineteenth-century individualism one of the major lines upon which it could fall back in its twentieth-century retreat. If neither physicians nor pastors could heal nervous people, patients would have to seek alternative sources of aid or learn to heal themselves. Paradoxically, they did both, often simultaneously. They discovered alternative sources of aid in mind cure—which promptly counseled them to fix themselves. The crankish cure-alls that flourished at the end of the century were an ingenious way to split the difference between their two nemeses, science and organized religion: mind cure and its brethren were precursors of the now-common claim to being “not religious but spiritual,” for they, too, straddled the growing schism between enchantment and Enlightenment, cloaking the consolations of religion in the sober mantle of scientific respectability. Here at last was that precious thing, license to believe in miracles without stanching the tides of Progress."

Everything is Too Small: https://a.co/fHaOfaQ