Emmanuel Movement - Notoriety and Opposition

Notoriety and Opposition

Publicity brought criticism, particularly from conservative physicians. Cabot, Coriat, and Pratt, however, remained loyal despite the onslaught. Putnam, who had been an early sponsor, withdrew his support in 1907 due to concerns that medical supervision was inadequate. Worcester took steps to increase the role of doctors in response to the criticism. He also reduced his contact with the media, as the notoriety was an annoyance to some of his parishioners.

Clarence Farrar, a Maryland psychiatrist, compared the movement to Christian Science. "Just now," he wrote, "while the mother science of Mrs. Eddy, synchronously with the patent medicine fraternity, has been getting into somewhat ill odor throughout the states, a Son of the Blood arises in the person of the Reverend Elwood Worcester, of Boston, and from the land of witchcraft and transcendentalism we receive a new gospel." The physicians supporting to movement, he claimed, were "willing to sell their birthright and to surrender a part of their legitimate province, to hand over impotently to the clergy for treatment, certain conditions which are just as truly the manifestations of disease or trauma as would be a broken limb or febrile delirium."

Sigmund Freud made his only visit to the United States in 1909, at the height of the media coverage of the Emmanuel movement. In an interview with a reporter for the Boston Evening Transcript on September 11, 1909, Freud admitted that he knew very little about the movement but said that "this undertaking of a few men without medical, or with very superficial medical training, seems to me at the very least of questionable good."