HARVARD ANNOUNCED the election of Charles W. Eliot as its president in March 1869. William wrote Harry that he knew more bad than good about Eliot, but he reserved judgment about the appointment. William’s back was worse. Letters from Harry emphasized his own poor health, now centered in severe constipation, which Harry found painful and demoralizing to the point of panic and near despair.
Feeling at the mercy of his body, William was more than ever convinced of the mechanistic, deterministic view of life. “I’m swamped in an empirical philosophy,” he wrote to Ward. “I feel that we are Nature through and through, that we are wholly conditioned, that not a wiggle of our will happens save as a result of physical laws.” The only mitigation or offset of this view was James’s feeling that, wholly conditioned as we are, we are still somehow “en rapport with reason.” He really couldn’t see his way through it. “It is not that we are all nature but [there is] some point which is reason,” he went on; it is rather “that all is Nature and all is reason too. We shall see, damn it, we shall see.”1 He seemed to be getting nowhere. He felt once more (as he confessed a few months later) that the bottom had fallen out. Cambridge seemed no better than Germany.
At the time Eliot became president, despite the impressive number of first-rate minds in Cambridge, Harvard as an educational institution was moribund. Its best historian writes, “Harvard College was hidebound, the Harvard Law School senescent, the Medical School ineffective, the Lawrence Scientific School the resort of shirks and stragglers.”2 Enrollment was declining at Harvard, at Union College, and elsewhere; a smaller percentage of Americans was going to college than had gone in 1838. The fixed, mostly classical curriculum seemed increasingly irrelevant to the fast-moving country. Graduate education was almost nonexistent. The first American Ph.D. had been granted at Yale in 1861, and Yale had made the first serious steps toward a coherent scheme of graduate education with the establishment of its graduate department of philosophy and the arts, which offered advanced instruction in philology, philosophy, and pure science.3 Nevertheless, there was in 1868–69 a total of thirteen resident graduate students enrolled in all fields in the entire Ivy League. The following year there were seven. Americans in search of a serious graduate education went to Germany. Three hundred went during the 1860s, a thousand during the 1870s.
Eliot issued fair warning that he intended to change things. He wrote a pair of articles for the Atlantic Monthly called “The New Education.” He sympathized with modern parents who wanted a practical education to enable their sons to follow “business or any other active calling.” He wanted to educate students for careers in “the workshops, factories, mines, forges, public works and counting rooms.” Eliot expected little help from the older faculty. “To have been a schoolmaster or college professor thirty years only too often makes a man an unsafe witness in matters of education,” Eliot said, and he used a railroad metaphor to explain: “There are flanges on his mental wheels which will only fit one gauge.” The existing gauge, the classical schools and colleges, did not offer what was wanted.
The new scientific schools that had sprung up since the late 1840s (Sheffield Scientific School at Yale, Chandler Scientific School at Dartmouth, School of Mines at Columbia, Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard) were at least moving in the right direction, toward “a system of education based chiefly upon the pure and applied sciences, the living European languages and mathematics, instead of upon Greek, Latin, and mathematics, as in the established college system.” But even the scientific schools had unacceptable limitations. The one at Harvard was only “a group of independent professorships, and each student was essentially just “the private pupil of some one of the professors, and the other professors are no more to him than if they did not exist.” The range of study was, therefore, “inconceivably narrow,” and one could take a B.S. degree “without a sound knowledge of any language, not even his own, and without any knowledge at all of philosophy, history, political science, or any of the natural or physical sciences, except the single one to which he has devoted two or three years at the most.”4
Eliot’s goal was to change the system from the top. If graduate and professional study could be reformed, everything leading up to it would have to change. That there was a demand for graduate education was proved by the Americans flocking to Germany. Eliot would try first to institute graduate-level lectures in philosophy and literature. He aimed to reform the law school and the medical school by making them graduate schools, which required their students to complete college degrees before entrance. Onto the existing—mainly English—system of recitations, lectures, and tutorials, Eliot grafted the German system, which was based on the strong department, the seminar, the specialized library, the laboratory, the monograph, and the learned journal.5
But the old order had not yet passed. Two days after Eliot became president, on May 21, 1869, William James handed in his medical thesis on the physiological effects of cold on the human body. One month later, on June 21, he took his final and only exam, the traditional ninety-minute oral exam, which William’s son later described as “rather like the mad tea-party in Alice in Wonderland.”6
It took place in one room. The professors of the nine required subjects stationed themselves at nine small tables around the room. The subjects were anatomy and physiology, surgery, chemistry, theory and practice of physic, midwifery and medical jurisprudence, materia medica, physiology and pathology of the nervous system, clinical medicine, and pathological anatomy. Nine students at a time were let into the room; each went up to a professor, who then administered a ten-minute oral test. A person in the middle of the room rang a bell at ten-minute intervals. At the bell, each of the nine students moved along to a different examiner. After ninety minutes of medical musical chairs, the dean called for votes. As he read out each student’s name, all nine professors, without consultation, thrust forward their voting paddles simultaneously. Each paddle was white on one side and had a black spot on the other. Any student with no more than four black spots passed. The diploma conferred an M.D. degree and was also the license to practice. The system thus released on society as certified doctors men who, in some cases, were deficient in almost one half of the subjects.
James had taken the exam more seriously than some of his comments suggest, and he had done a great deal of studying. He carefully counted up the weeks he had spent on his medical education and came up with a total of three years and two or three months. He had, in fact, a good deal of medical knowledge, as such knowledge was understood at the time. Physiology, his area of study, was the subject that above all others would transform medicine from an art into a science. For all his professed distaste for medicine, then, James was part of this leading edge of change.
When it was Dr. Holmes’s turn to examine William James at the mad tea party, Holmes asked a couple of questions about the nervus petrosis superficialis minor. When James answered, Holmes said, “If you know that you know everything,” then asked for news of William’s family. “I passed my examination with no difficulty,” James wrote Bowditch, “and am entitled to write myself MD if I choose.” He did not so choose; he saw the degree as the end of something, not the beginning, and he wrote Bowditch, “So there is one epoch of my life closed.”7