Pragmatism and idealism in the professions: The case of Richard Clarke Cabot, 1869-1939

Richard Clarke Cabot (1869-1939) was a Boston physician who contributed to social work, psychotherapy, ministerial education, and nursing as well as medicine. These contributions were unified by a philosophy of broad, pragmatic empiricism founded in Cabot's study of philosophy beginning as an undergraduate at Harvard. Cabot's philosophical views were influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Elliot Cabot and Elizabeth Dwight Cabot (his father and mother), Ella Lyman Cabot (his wife), Josiah Royce, John Dewey, William James, William Ernest Hocking, and Alfred North Whitehead. Cabot dissented from narrow empiricism driven by industrialization and political reaction. Cabot pointed to the importance of considering qualitative as well as quanitative data in making professional decisions. An implication of this was a social inclusiveness which pointed to the importance of broad participation: women, immigrants, and the non-experts.;Each of Cabot's professional involvements embodied and developed his broadened pragmatism. In medicine he developed case teaching methods and functional methods of diagnosing heart and kidney disorders. In social work Cabot helped bring social workers into hospitals in hopes that they would help "socialize" medicine and that social workers would in turn learn to critically evaluate their work. Through involvement in the Emmanuel Movement Cabot advocated an "American psychotherapy" in reaction to Weir Mitchell's rest cure and which would draw eclectically from the various schools of psychotherapy what is most clinically effective. In his role as professor of Social Ethics at Harvard Cabot represented an effort to continue the socially critical tradition of Francis Greenwood Peabody and bring to it both a philosophical examination of foundational concepts and social scientific insights. Cabot brought his perspectives to theological education through the role he took in the beginning of Clinical Pastoral Education or, as he preferred, Clinical Theological Education. Cabot's work is important both for the contribution that he made to the development of the professions and as a lost perspective which could become important as the professions again face a period of basic reconsideration of their role in society.