Haanel on Health and Healing: What He Taught

Health is one of the three great promises of The Master Key System. Part Nine names the things all people want as "Health, Wealth and Love," and Health comes first. Charles Haanel returned to the subject throughout his writing, most fully in Part Twenty-Two of the course and in the medical chapters of his 1922 book Mental Chemistry.

This guide reports what he taught about health and healing. It does not endorse it. Haanel's ideas about the body are beliefs from the New Thought movement of the early twentieth century, not medicine, and nothing on this page is health advice. Anyone who is ill should be guided by a qualified medical professional. Quotations come from public domain scans of the 1919 St. Louis edition of the course and the 1922 St. Louis edition of Mental Chemistry.

The basic idea: thought comes first

Haanel's whole system rests on the claim that conditions in life reflect conditions in the mind. Health is treated the same way. Part Twenty-Two opens its health lesson like this:

If the state of our health is not all that could be desired, let us examine our method of thinking.

He goes on to say that every thought leaves an impression, that impressions sink into the subconscious mind and form tendencies, and that the result is "a crop which must be harvested." If those thoughts "contain disease germs," he writes, the harvest will be "sickness, decay, weakness and failure."

This is the same reasoning the course uses for money and success, and it is the course's law of attraction turned inward: like thought produces like condition, in the body as in business.

Vibration and the cells

Haanel explained the mechanism through vibration, a popular idea in New Thought writing of his time. Part Twenty-Two (paragraph 5) says:

It is through the law of vibration that the mind exercises this control over the body.

Since all form is, in his account, "a rate of vibration," and thought is also a vibration, he reasons that thought can change the body. He builds the argument into a numbered chain of "We know" statements, ending with the claim that "We know how to make any physical change in the body we desire."

He also describes the cells of the body as intelligent. "Every cell in your body is intelligent and will respond to your direction," he writes in paragraph 15. In paragraph 12 he pictures the body's repair cells as "an army of workmen" who are discouraged and halted by "thoughts of fear, doubt and anxiety."

Everyday examples he used

Some of Haanel's examples are ordinary and easy to recognize. In paragraph 10 he notes that a joke can make you laugh until your body shakes, that sympathy can bring tears, and that anger can send blood to your cheeks. He takes these as proof that thought acts on the muscles, glands and circulation, though he adds that such effects are temporary.

For deeper effects he turns to healing. When a bone breaks, he writes, "No surgeon on earth can weld the parts together. He may set the bone for you," and then the subconscious mind does the rest. Haanel reads the body's natural repair processes as the work of an intelligent mind within.

Visualization as a method

The method Haanel recommends is the one found throughout the course: a clear mental picture, held steadily. Paragraph 4 says, "Make a mental image of physical perfection, hold it in the mind until it is absorbed by the consciousness." The same paragraph then claims that "Many have eliminated chronic ailments in a few weeks by this method." Haanel gives no names, records or numbers to support that statement.

The practical training behind this is the same as for any other goal. Students build concentration through the sitting exercise and the visualization exercises of the early parts, then apply those skills to whatever they wish to change. Part Twenty-Four carries the idea furthest, describing disease as a mental condition and recommending that the student "go into the Silence and Know the Truth." It connects this to the Universal Mind, which Haanel describes as "the totality of all mind which is in existence."

What he said about doctors

It would be easy to assume that Haanel rejected medicine. The texts are more mixed than that. Part Twenty-Two quotes a physician, named in the 1919 printing as Dr. Albert T. Shofield, who argues that mental therapeutics should be taught "in every medical school." At the end of the same part, Haanel attacks the idea that sickness is sent by God, pointing out that if it were, "every physician, every surgeon and every Red Cross nurse is defying the will of God." He calls that conclusion an absurdity.

In Mental Chemistry he is warmer still toward the profession. In the chapter titled "Medicine" he writes that "the doctors, with their wide knowledge and splendid service, would have solved the problem long ago, had it been a purely physical one." His own position follows: "it is a mental problem long before it becomes a physical one."

The healing chapters of Mental Chemistry

Mental Chemistry has several chapters on health, including "Medicine," "Mental Medicine," "Orthobiosis," "Biochemistry" and "Suggestion." A reader quickly notices how much of them is quotation. Haanel quotes Dr. Osler on the healing power of faith, Dr. Lindlahr's "Nature Cure Philosophy" with its definitions of health and disease as harmonious and inharmonious vibration, Thomson Jay Hudson's The Law of Mental Medicine, and Alfred T. Schofield's lists of reported cures. The "Orthobiosis" chapter draws on Elie Metchnikoff, the "Biochemistry" chapter on Dr. Schuessler's cell salts, and the "Suggestion" chapter on a visit to Emile Coué's clinic in Nancy.

These chapters are best read as a survey of mind and body ideas that were circulating around 1922, collected by a man who believed they all pointed the same way. His later book The New Psychology (1924) reuses several of the same chapter titles, so readers of Haanel's other books will meet this material more than once.

Belief, not medicine

It is worth being plain about the limits.

• No evidence offered. Claims that visualization removed chronic ailments in weeks, or that a thought of truth "destroys every form of error," are assertions. Haanel cites no studies of his own.
• Dated science. His talk of vibration, ether and intelligent cells reflects the popular science of 1910 to 1925. Modern biology and medicine do not support the idea that thought can make "any physical change in the body we desire."
• Real effects, overstated. Some of what he describes, such as stress affecting digestion or the placebo response, are real and studied. Haanel takes those modest facts and stretches them into a general theory of healing.
• A risk of blame. If illness is "the result of wrong thinking," as Part Twenty-Four puts it, the sick can end up blamed for their condition. That is a reason to read these passages with care.

How to read these passages today

For students of the course, the health lessons are part of the historical record. They show how a New Thought writer tried to fit the body into a single theory of mind, and they explain why later books in the same tradition, from Napoleon Hill to Rhonda Byrne, make similar promises. Read them as history and belief, keep medical decisions with medical professionals, and judge the rest of the course on its own terms.

If you want the original wording, the 1919 text is in the public domain and free to read, and our guide to Haanel the St. Louis businessman explains the practical outlook he brought to all of it.