In the years from 1895 to 1910, suggestive therapeutics, in its various guises and applications, was the prevailing popular psychotherapeutic treatment featured in print culture and to which large numbers of Americans turned, seeking relief for both physical and psychological disorders. The "Chicago School of Psychology"-a health institution founded by Herbert A. Parkyn offering free treatment and clinical instruction in suggestive therapeutics- along with Hypnotic Magazine, the unofficial organ of the school edited by Sydney B. Flower, reigned supreme in Midwestern psychotherapeutics and "magazine medicine."
With his patients reclined on an Allison surgical table, Parkyn's suggestive treatments sought to increase blood flow to afflicted painful areas, while urging upon patients a proper diet, fresh air, and exercise-what he termed "life essentials." Both Parkyn and Flower purposely allied suggestive therapeutics to a host of related reform movements, such as physical culture, psychical research, practical psychology, and the acquisition of heightened occult mental powers often associated with the New Thought. Often mistaken as a form of Christian Science, the Chicago School of Psychology found it difficult to maintain its image as a distinct type of psychotherapy. Its identification with irregular psychological healing sects and its multitude of social and scientific interests placed it at the crossroads of medical and religious pluralism. The closure of the Chicago School of Psychology in 1906 coincided with the spread of the Emmanuel Movement to Chicago, where it became known as "Christian Psychology," marking the final popular years of suggestive therapeutics in Chicago.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332519038_The_Chicago_School_of_Psychology_and_Hypnotic_Magazine_Suggestive_therapeutics_public_psychologies_and_new_thought_pluralism_1895-1910
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/109040607/herbert-arthur-parkyn
Doctor H.A. Parkyn who is credited with organizing the first hockey game on
February 18, 1895 for the University of Minnesota.
Born on Christmas Eve in Montreal, Canada Herbert
Arthur Parkyn got his medical degree from the University
of Toronto. While there he also learned to
play hockey.
Coming to the University of Minnesota in 1894 Parkyn enrolled in dentistry
school.
After one season as President, Manager, and player for the hockey team Parkyn left Minnesota
for Chicago to pursue his one true passion, Hypnosis!
Parkyn would eventually open the Chicago School of Psychology in 1898.
He would return to Minnesota one more time in 1915 for an Alumni Dinner. Parkyn died in 1927.
https://www.thedailygopher.com/2018/3/29/17173466/minnesota-gophers-hockey-team-pride-on-ice-first-coach-1895-tbt
The medical hypnotist Dr. Herbert Arthur Parkyn (1879-1927)
received his medical degree in 1892 from Queen’s University in Kingston,
Ontario, before taking graduate work at McGill Medical College in Montreal and
the Medical College at Toronto University. Following his training, he moved to
Chicago in 1896 to accept a chair in psychotherapeutics at Illinois Medical
College (1894), the first of its kind in the Midwest. His responsibilities also
included directing a free clinic attached to the college. News of this
position, however, sent shock waves among members of the city’s medical
profession who equated psychotherapeutics as akin to quackery. Through its
local and state societies, the profession derided psychotherapeutics as nothing
more than a new term for debunked religious and pseudo-scientific practices,
i.e., royal touch, laying-on-hands, animal magnetism, hypnotism, Perkinism,
divine healing, electro-biology, patheism, and faith-cure. Pressure eventually
forced William
F. Waugh, dean of the Illinois Medical
College, and Randolph N. Hall, its president, to rescind Parkyn’s
appointment.
Disappointed but undeterred, Parkyn
opened his own Chicago School of Psychology and free clinic on Bowen Avenue on
the city’s South Side. Several years later, in 1901, he founded the University
of Psychic Science located on Cottage Grove Avenue also on the South Side.
Supported by an assemblage of the city’s progressive physicians; devotees of
hypnotism, suggestive therapeutics, New Thought, and holistic health; and
sectarian healers from osteopathy, chiropractic, vitopathy, and homeopathy, the
school and university became an integral part of a national movement in
psychotherapeutics, with Parkyn serving as its leading spokesman in
Chicago. In some ways, the school follow
As a way of promoting Parkyn’s school and university, Flower used the pages of the magazine to teach hypnotism to a skeptical medical profession including instructions on how and when to use it on patients. At the same time, he employed the magazine to attack the ragtag of pseudo professors and lay healers who dominated the field of suggestive therapeutics. This included Mary Baker Eddy with her Christian Science healers and their fixation on MAM (“Malicious Animal Magnetism”), and the “success treatments” offered by the Rev. John Alexander Dowie, a Scottish-Australian evangelist and minister of divine healing who settled in Chicago where he treated a broad range of psychosomatic illnesses.
Recognizing the magazine was purchased by the very pseudo healers he so publicly rebuked, Flower reversed his policy and reached out to all occultists, spiritualists, and lay healers. This included policemen and detectives interested in using hypnotism in criminology; attorneys curious as to its potential application in the courts; those treating alcoholism; others interested in using hypnotism as a method of education during natural sleep; and those who saw its potential use in homeopathy and anesthesiology. No longer a spokesperson for only medical orthodoxy, Flower now played to much larger audiences, causing an increase in the circulation of Hypnotic Magazine to 4,000 copies.
Recognizing the potential growth of the psychotherapeutic
healing industry, Flower left the employment of Parkyn
and, while still publishing the school’s clinical reports, started his own
Psychic Publishing Company to sell his
Course in Personal Magnetism, Self-Control Control and the
Development of Character (1901);
The Power Within: A Work Dealing with the Practical Developments of Psychic
Research (1901); and
Somnopathy: A Method of Healing Disease, Correcting Bad Habits, Educating
Young and Old, Improving the Character (1902).
In addition, he sold
Annette Dresser’sPhilosophy
of P. P. Quimby (1896);
Horatio W. Dresser’sThe
Power of Silence (1896);
Leander Whipple’s The
Philosophy of Mental Healing (1893); and
Ralph Waldo Trine’sWhat
All the World’s A-Seeking (1895).
Year by year, his inventory expanded to include
Mary F. Haydon’s Bible
Year Book of the New Thought (1903);
Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s The
Heart of the New Thought (1902);
James Escaile’s Mesmerism in India (1902);
Frances Partlow’s Training
of Children in the New Thought(1902);
Elizabeth Towne’s Joy
Philosophy (1903);and Uriel Buchanan’s The Mind’s Attainment (1902).
Sometime in the
late 1890s, Atkinson and his family moved
to Chicago, and got involved with Flower. By 1902, he was convinced he had
found his niche in the New Thought Movement.
Following the World’s Parliament of Religions which met for seventeen days
during the Columbian Exhibition of 1893, magazine which he published and
edited, Atkinson capitalized on this newest interest by writing articles under his own name and using the pseudonyms of Yogi Ramacharaka, Swami Bhakta Vishita, Swami Panchadasi, Theron Q. Dumont, the Three Initiates(The Kybalion (1908)
under the pseudonym of),Magus Incognito(The Secret Doctrines of the Rosicrucians (1918);
and), L. W. de
Laurence or Lauron W. de Laurence (Crystal Gazing and Spiritual Clairvoyance (1913);), and Theodore Sheldon to carry his message.
Excerpted from William Walker Atkinson: An Intellectual Biography
John Haller Jr
Informative read.
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