A Review of Ray Stannard Baker's "New Ideals in Healing"

Date Published: June 29, 2026

Ray Stannard Baker was one of America’s outstanding journalists and a leading “muckraker” of the late 19th and 20th Centuries. He wrote on many topics beyond capitalism and industrialists. As shown in this work, Mr. Baker studies “religion” (see one doctor’s definition below) and “science” in an attempt to find a balance between the two organizations covered in this book: The Emmanuel Movement (religious) and Massachusetts General Hospital’s Social Services Department.
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It is in the achievement of a balance between these two thoughts and “driving forces” that he believed more “miracles” of religion and science could be achieved, and that …

Mankind would be the better for it.

Peter E. Greulich, 2026

A Review of “New Ideals in Healing” by Ray Stannard Baker

• Reviews of the Day from 1909 for “New Ideals in Healing”
• Selected Insights of Ray Stannard Baker from “New Ideals in Healing”
• This Author’s Review of “New Ideals in Healing” by Ray Stannard Baker

Reviews of the Day from 1909 for “New Ideals in Healing”

• A Review from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Books and Magazines, March 11, 1909

“Ray Stannard Baker, the author of ‘New Ideals In Healing’ is one of the group of authors who as young men in Chicago did brilliant work for those papers. … After Mr. Baker came to New York he joined the staff of McClure’s Magazine and later became associate editor of The American Magazine.

“In his first period he gained a reputation for clear insight into scientific wonders—new inventions and discoveries—any material progress which he could explain and interpret in such a way as to make it significant and interesting. Later he became closely affiliated with The American Magazine group—Ida Tarbell and others, who were interested in social problems and in the interpretation of the more spiritual life of the nation.

“His latest book, ‘New Ideals in Healing’ represents the joining of these two lines of development.
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“On the one hand he treats the scientific aspect of the new medical movements and interprets them to the popular mind, and then on the other he explains the ‘Emmanuel Movement’ and similar activities, showing how both are evidences of a great ‘spiritual unrest’ pervading the nation.”

Books and Magazines, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, March 11, 1909

Front Dust Cover of "New Ideals in Healing"

• A Review from The Boston Globe, New Literature, February 20, 1909

“Of all the descriptions appearing this spring of the Emmanuel Movement, nothing is more interesting and enlightening than Ray Stannard Baker’s book, ‘New Ideals in Healing.’

“With Mr. Baker’s well-known cleverness and keenness in analyzing significant questions of the day, he has taken up this question and described it clearly and succinctly. He neither criticizes nor praises, but gives to the reader a comprehensive idea of what the movement is, showing how clergymen are recognizing the fact that man has a body and that physicians are recognizing that man has a soul.
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“It is an impartial, able treatise.”

New Literature, The Boston Globe, February 20, 1909

• A Review from The New York Times, Saturday Review of Books, February 6, 1909

An example of a “Consumptive Class” recommendation to get more “clean air” and relaxation. Consumption was an early name for tuberculosis.

“This week, Ray Stannard Baker’s ‘New Ideals in Healing’ appears in which the author, from a fairly sympathetic or, at least, not intolerant point of view, estimates the new ‘Emmanuel Movement’ as an outcome of certain tendencies which have been undergoing varying degrees of modifications in the evolution of the Church on one hand, and a decline in the authoritative position—formerly held by the medical profession, on the other.
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“These two features give Mr. Baker the special subject for his book, which is descriptive of Dr. Elwood C. Worcestor’s work in Boston under the auspices of the Emmanuel Church, and Dr. R. C. Cabot’s Social Service work at the Massachusetts General Hospital.”

Saturday Review of Books, The New York Times, February 6, 1909

Selected Insights of Ray Stannard Baker from “New Ideals in Healing”

• Health is a public concern—not a private one

“Such fine new work, such as the Social Service Department at the Massachusetts General Hospital under Dr. R. C. Cabot and Dr. J. H. Pratt, is significant in many ways of our changing outlook upon life. It is the eager reaching out of the medical profession to do more work and do it more unselfishly. It is an effort to treat disease socially, rather than individually.

“It illustrates the tendency toward the growth in strength of the great departments of health in our States and cities, and of the great hospitals—and the relative decline in influence of the private practitioner. It recognizes the fact that health is not a mere private concern, but essentially a public matter.

“It is significant, also, that the doctor, in reaching out toward greater and better things, finds himself face to face with two gargantuan enemies: poverty and ignorance. Traced back, a large proportion of all diseases lead to one or both of those causes. …

Dr. Richard C. Cabot of Massachusetts General Hospital.​

“We are all being driven to a belief in the essential unity of men: the fundamental idea of democracy. Out of the chaos of the present spiritual unrest a tremendous idea is slowly shaping itself: firing up the beliefs of every man who sees it with new inspirations and new enthusiasms. We see that we must step together, that a spot on one of us, whether of disease, or ignorance, or poverty, is a spot on us all; that we cannot progress as individuals, but only as we bring along with us ‘the fatherless and widows in their affliction.’
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“They, too, also belong in our democracy, in which no one can be moral until all are moral, and none can be happy until all are happy.”

New Ideals in Healing, Ray Stannard Baker, 1909

• Doctor Richard C. Cabot’s Perspective on “Religion and the Individual"

Ray Stannard Baker wrote that "Dr. Richard C. Cabot was educated at Harvard, first broadly in philosophy and, afterwards, in psychology: he is a man first and then a doctor. Though a member of no church, his view of life is profoundly religious: broad, deep, inclusive of all men."
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Dr. R. C. Cabot told Ray Stannard Baker the following:

“I mean by religion, the deepest thing that there is in any human being.

“It seems to me, when you reach for the core of any man, you are reaching for that divine spark in him; that is, you reach his religion. Religion is not one energy or one interest among others, … it is the very heart, the center, the core of every interest.

“In my opinion any man is slovenly and slipshod who does not find his ‘religion’ as the ultimate motive and goal of his task, whatever it is. Under this definition, it is obvious that we cannot go to the bottom of any trouble, whether it be health or grief or anything else, without reaching ‘religion.’
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“If religion includes the whole of our life as a house includes a room, then the man who would set his house in order must know all the rooms. He must know the whole of the house before he ventures to touch any part of it.”

​New Ideals in Healing, Dr. Richard C. Cabot, 1909

An example of a “Tuberculosis/Consumptive Class” where all are still healthy and active two years later.​

• The Chief Problem with Religion (the Church) and the Health Professional

“The chief trouble with the church is that it does not get to people … or get into people … and the same is true of the hospital. Both are discovering—as we are all discovering in our march toward democracy—that nothing, finally, can take the place of direct human touch.
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“There is no professional or scientific or ritualistic way out … to reach an individual and cure them, whatever their ills, they must be met squarely as human beings.”

​New Ideals in Healing, Ray Stannard Baker, 1909

This Author’s Review of “New Ideals in Healing” by Ray Stannard Baker

Examples of the lengths individuals and their families had to go to in order to ensure they got enough “fresh air” to combat tuberculosis.

My first observation is that when reading about the Ebola outbreak in Africa, one must wonder about the insights of Ray Stannard Baker that are more than a century old. When he observed that health was a public concern not a private one … he was very on-target—especially when he wrote that the first problem in the early 20th Century that our own doctors encountered was “poverty and ignorance.”

Today we see individuals attack those who are trying to keep them from getting infected by touching their dead father, mother, son or sibling. It is so horrible, yet understandable. It must be addressed first and foremost with education—in this respect religion and science must work together.

The second observation has to do with our ever-growing reliance on social media. Ray Stannard Baker wrote that few professional or scientific improvements can be achieved without the insertion of a caring, direct human touch.
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Will Artificial Intelligence truly be able to console us, advise us, mentor, or “improve” us like another human being who can reach out touch our shoulder and speak such words as: “I have been there. I have done that. I have survived. … I have recovered … Now let me help you!”

It is very doubtful, so reach out and “touch.”

Cheers,
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Peter E. Greulich

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