Wattles, The Science of Getting Rich, 1910 The 1890s was an age of medical progress. Ads for patent medicines, from digestive syrups to baldness-curing creams, could still be found in most magazines, but medicine, like other fields of study, became more scientific and systematized. Colleges began graduate programs in the sciences and psychology. Physicians and researchers made dramatic advances in treating and preventing microbial diseases. The American public for the first time began to view doctors as figures to be trusted rather than feared. State legislatures and courts, meanwhile, started to stringently scrutinize the mental-healing philosophies. In several well-publicized cases, patients had died after receiving Christian Science treatments rather than normative medical care. No prosecutions resulted, as the courts were unable to demonstrate that conventional treatment would have resulted in different outcomes. In the wake of the controversy, the state of Massachusetts began to pass licensing laws designed to prevent religious healers from calling themselves medical practitioners.
