The Rev. Dr. Elwood Worcester became the rector of Emmanuel Church, Boston, in 1904, and served there until his retirement in 1929. While at Emmanuel Church he worked on combining religion and science, resulting in a healing ministry which lasted until his retirement. The movement began when Worcester developed a program for the treatment of tuberculosis patients under the auspices of Emmanuel Church. The plan included health education for patients and their families as well as in-home medical care. Gradually the plan was expanded to include the treatment of nervous and psychic disorders. In Nov. 1906, Emmanuel Church held a series of four lectures about health and healing, culminating with the offer of treatment beginning the next day. On the next day, approximately 200 persons arrived at Emmanuel Church for healing prayer and treatment by physicians. This ministry expanded and grew into the Emmanuel Movement. It spread from its New England base. It was aided by stories in Good Housekeeping and Ladies' Home Journal, as well as books such as Religion and Medicine: The Moral Control of Nervous Disorders. The movement stressed the cooperation of clergy and medical professionals in the ministry of healing. The movement declined after Worcester retired.

William McDougall William McDougall was an experimental psychologist and theorist of wide-ranging interests. Above all, he believed in a holistic psychology that utilized every available tool for understanding the human psyche. He was the first to formulate a theory of human instinctual behavior, and he influenced the development of the new field of social psychology.

McDougall was educated at Owens College, Manchester and St John's College, Cambridge. He also studied medicine and physiology in London and Göttingen. After teaching at University College London and Oxford, he was recruited to occupy the William James chair of psychology at Harvard University in 1920, where he served as a professor of psychology from 1920 to 1927. He then moved to Duke University, where he established the Parapsychology Laboratory under J. B. Rhine, and where he remained until his death. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society. Among his students were Cyril Burt, May Smith, William Brown and John Flügel.

McDougall's interests and sympathies were broad. He was interested in eugenics, but departed from neo-Darwinian orthodoxy in maintaining the possibility of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, as suggested by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck; he carried out many experiments designed to demonstrate this process. Opposing behaviourism, he argued that behaviour was generally goal-oriented and purposive, an approach he called hormic psychology (from Greek ὁρμή hormḗ "impulse").

However, in the theory of motivation, he defended the idea that individuals are motivated by a significant number of inherited instincts, whose action they may not consciously understand, so they might not always understand their own goals. His ideas on instinct strongly influenced Konrad Lorenz, though Lorenz did not always acknowledge this. McDougall underwent psychoanalysis with C. G. Jung, and was also prepared to study parapsychology.