Episcopal priests Elwood Worcester and Samuel McComb established a clinic at the church which lasted 23 years and offered both medical and psychological services.
He was raised in an educated middle-class family which fell into poverty as a result of business reversals and the death of Worcester's father.
One of his parishioners at St. Stephens was noted neurologist S. Weir Mitchell, who became a close friend and a source of guidance in the application of depth psychology to ministry.
[4] Boston was the center of a local "medical psychotherapy" tradition going back to the 1890s when William James, Josiah Royce, Hugo Munsterberg and Boris Sidis developed individualized techniques for the relief of mental distress.
James Jackson Putnam (1846–1918), Harvard's first professor of diseases of the nervous system and a founder of the American Psychoanalytic Association, was influenced by this tradition of eclectic therapy.
Dr. Richard C. Cabot, in 1905, concluded that he didn’t have enough information to make exact diagnoses of his patients at the Massachusetts General Hospital clinics.
With his own money, he hired a nurse, Garnet Isabel Pelton (November 25, 1868 - June 15, 1925), to serve as Mass General’s first social worker.
Then, in 1907, Dr. Cabot hired Ida Maud Cannon (June 29, 1877 - July 7, 1960), who later held the title of Chief of Social Service (1914-1945) at the hospital.
Cabot wrote popular books on counseling, ethics and religion which reflected his continuing loyalty to the philosophy he had learned under Josiah Royce.
[6] In 1905, Dr. Pratt asked Elwood Worcester if Emmanuel Church could offer any support for a project to improve the care of tuberculosis patients living in the poorest sections of Boston.
Dr. Pratt hoped to encourage rest, optimal nutrition and fresh air (the primary treatments then used in tuberculosis sanatoria) through classes and home visits.
Emmanuel Church provided both meeting space and the entire funding of the project, but there was no clergy involvement or religious component.
Encouraged by the success of the tuberculosis class, Worcester consulted local neurologists about the possibility of similar work among the "nervously and morally diseased."
Courtenay F. Baylor (November 3, 1870 - May 30, 1947), a former insurance salesman who had come to Elwood Worcester for help with his own problems a few years earlier, was hired in 1912.
[3] Ladies Home Journal published a series of articles written by Elwood Worcester in 1908-9 introducing his ideas to a national audience.
The first book about the movement, Religion and Medicine, The Moral Control of Nervous Disorders by Worcester, McComb and Isador Coriat, appeared in 1908.
The church continued to offer large lectures and classes, primarily devoted to what would now be termed "functional" illness (Worcester and McComb did not claim that they could cure organic disease).
"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.
Elwood Worcester had little time to devote to work with individuals while serving as rector, but continued to supervise Courtenay Baylor and other lay therapists who trained at Emmanuel.
Ernest Jacoby (November 6, 1880 - 1934), a Boston rubber merchant and Emmanuel parishioner, began weekly meetings for men with alcohol problems in 1909.
In a 1910 church newsletter Elwood Worcester wrote that it was not "an ordinary temperance society," that the goal was "to see that careful scientific treatment by qualified physicians and clergymen is administered to those who need it."
The Jacoby Club remained active through the 1920s and 30s, and in its declining years provided space for the earliest Boston meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous.