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The Jacksons

Herbert Parkyn maintained close ties with his Jackson relatives, who exerted a lasting influence on his life. His paternal aunt Mary Ann Parkyn married Rev. Samuel Nelson Jackson in 1866, and the couple settled in the family's Côte Saint-Paul community. Rev. Jackson was both a medical doctor and a leading Congregational minister with national and international standing. He served as Chairman of the Congregational Union of Ontario and Quebec, editor of the Canadian Independent, and president of the Congregational Publishing Company. As General Secretary of the Congregational Missionary Society, he helped establish the Pan-Congregational Council, the first body to unite Congregational churches worldwide. He also spent eighteen years as a director and faculty member at the Congregational College at McGill University, where he authored A Handbook of Congregationalism.

Cricket

Parkyn was also a standout cricket player. In early 1894 he became assistant secretary of Toronto's Rosedale Cricket Club, where he played alongside Hall of Famer George Lyon, who that year set a Canadian record of 238 not out that stood for four decades.

Parkyn forms hockey clubs in Chicago

In 1896, after moving to Chicago, Parkyn started a hockey team affiliated with the Chicago Athletic Association. Taking on the dual roles of manager and captain, he led the team for several years, organizing matches in many cities, such as Montreal, Toronto, Pittsburgh, and Minneapolis. In 1901 he established a hockey team at the Kenwood Country Club in Chicago that would play regional matches against other local club teams in Chicago. Opponents included teams from Hyde Park, Highland Park, Lake Forest, Evanston, Riverside, and Washington Park.

Education

In 1888 Herbert Parkyn entered Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. That same year his father moved to Winnipeg to oversee construction of the Lake of the Woods Mills, leaving Herbert with his Jackson relatives who had moved to Kingston when Rev. S. N. Jackson became pastor of the First Congressional Church of Kingston. Also enrolled at Queen's at the time was Joseph Wells Jackson, the eldest son of Dr. John Henry Jackson, who likewise pursued medicine. After graduating in 1891, Parkyn completed the examinations of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario the following year and received his medical degree from the Queen's University Faculty of Medicine. 

Herbert then undertook postgraduate studies at McGill University Medical College in Montreal, following a well established Jackson family pattern of medical training, as both Dr. John Henry Jackson and Dr. Joseph Addison Jackson, had completed postgraduate work at McGill's medical college. He then continued his medical education at the University of Toronto Medical College, where he was active for several years in the medical department, specializing in the research of anesthesia and the science of hypnotism. Early in his medical studies, Parkyn had become intensely interested in the psychology of the mind and undertook a focused study of the science of hypnotism. He continued to develop his understanding of suggestive therapeutics and psycho-therapeutics throughout his entire academic training.

While completing this postgraduate work at the University of Toronto Medical College, he was also beginning his education in running a medical practice and starting businesses. From 1892 to 1894 he maintained his own medical practice in Toronto, focusing on psycho-therapeutics and reporting a record of more than 240 successful hypnotic cases during this period. He also started and managed the Incandescent Gas Light Exchange in Toronto to compete against a monopoly in the Canadian lighting trade. In 1894, Parkyn relocated to Minneapolis, Minnesota, and enrolled in the University of Minnesota, where he began working closely with the dean of the dental school, Dr. W. Xavier Sudduth, on experiments with hypnosis.

The Stevenson brothers and Richard Maurice Bucke

During his entire medical training, Parkyn was a classmate of Dr. Hugh A. Stevenson, with whom he shared a parallel medical education and a research interest in hypnotism as an anesthesia. Stevenson followed the same institutional path, studying medicine at Queen's University in Kingston, undertaking postgraduate work at McGill, and completing further medical training at the University of Toronto. Dr. Hugh Stevenson would later practice medicine and serve as a three term mayor in his home town of London, Ontario. For many years he worked in professional partnership with his younger brother, Dr. William J. Stevenson, a physician of international reputation who would later study at Parkyn's Chicago School of Psychology and also pursued advanced study in suggestive therapeutics in Nancy, France, under Hippolyte Bernheim.

Both Hugh and William Stevenson were closely involved with Richard Maurice Bucke, a well known psychiatrist, philosopher, and founder of the medical school at the University of Western Ontario in London. Through his close association with the Stevensons, Parkyn was strongly influenced by the ideas of Bucke who spent thirty years developing his evolutionary theory of consciousness that was eventually published in 1901 as Cosmic Consciousness.

Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke proposed that humanity progresses through successive stages of awareness culminating in what he termed cosmic consciousness. At the time, the term and concept were not established in psychology and entered modern discourse through Bucke's work. Parkyn adopted this framework and expressed a conviction that human consciousness was evolving toward higher states, a belief that was a foundational element of Parkyn's psychological and therapeutic outlook.

Influenced by the teachings of Richard Maurice Bucke 2

Richard Maurice Bucke, a psychiatrist and founder of the medical school at the University of Western Ontario in London, was an early influence on Parkyn. Bucke’s teaching, later published in Cosmic Consciousness, stated that human awareness evolves through stages and eventually culminates in "cosmic consciousness," a concept Parkyn incorporated into his own psychological outlook.

Parkyn became connected to Burke through his classmate and close friend, Hugh A. Stevenson, who followed the same course through Queen’s, McGill, and the University of Toronto and also studied hypnotism as an anesthesia with Parkyn. Stevenson later became a physician and three-term mayor of London, Ontario, and practiced with his brother, William J. Stevenson, who attended Parkyn’s Chicago School and studied at the Nancy School. Both the brothers were closely associated with Burke and helped fund his medical school.

Sudduth

Parkyn’s connection to Sudduth came through his cousin, Dr. John Holmes Jackson, who had studied under Sudduth in Philadelphia. Before moving to Minnesota, Sudduth had led the dental and anatomy departments at the Medico-Chirurgical College of Philadelphia, which had absorbed the Philadelphia Dental College. That institution had earlier incorporated hypnosis into its curriculum, where figures such as John H. McQuillan and William Henry Atkinson studied its use as dental anesthesia, alongside elements of mesmerism and Swedenborgianism.

Flower

In late 1895, Sydney Blanshard Flower became Dr. Parkyn's publicist and business manager in preparation for Parkyn's plans to open a school of psychology and a public clinic in Chicago the following year. Flower had previously worked as the sports reporter for the Winnipeg Free Press, where he had worked with Parkyn in promoting and covering the international hockey match between the Winnipeg Victorias and the University of Minnesota. The two developed a personal bond with having similar backgrounds in championship sports. Flower was the lawn tennis champion of both Manitoba and the Dakotas and also played cricket for the English national team that was formed by the best English immigrant players in Canada to compete against the best Canadian born players.

Alongside his journalism, Flower had spent several years writing editorials and short fiction for regional newspapers. Through his association with Parkyn, he developed a strong interest in hypnotism and recognized the potential for publishing works on the subject. In December 1895, Flower left the Winnipeg Free Press and relocated to Toronto, where he began his formal collaboration with Parkyn by writing the books, Hypnotism Up to Date and A Study in Hypnotism, as promotional works outlining Parkyn's theories and methods of hypnotic therapeutics.

Hypnotism Up To Date

Hypnotism Up to Date was written as dialogues between Flower, as the "skeptical inquirer", and Parkyn, as "the doctor," explaining hypnosis. It was first released only under Sydney Flower's name, but later advertised as co-authored with Dr. Parkyn, as the book is largely made up of dialogue by Parkyn. In the introduction, Flower calls himself Parkyn's "mouthpiece," and credits the valuable work Parkyn has done with rescuing hypnotism from charlatans and presenting it in its true form.

The book follows Dr. Parkyn's teaching that hypnotism is a natural mental state, and not a supernatural power and insists that hypnosis cannot compel crime or reveal secrets and that it is perfectly safe when practiced correctly. Hypnotism is presented as both a moral and medical force that can cure bad habits, relieve pain, and restore health. Finally, it criticizes the use of hypnotism in popular fiction like Conan Doyle’s A Parasite, for spreading false ideas about control and danger, asserting that hypnotism, rightly understood, is a valuable aid to science and human progress.

A Study in Hypnotism

A Study in Hypnotism follows a fictional narrative, tracing the experiences of a hypnotist named Richard Robinson who debates the power of suggestion with skeptics, while also falling into a romantic relationship with a beautiful high-society patient. The narrative is filled with debates over the mysterious power of hypnotism with Robinson arguing its genuinely scientific, entirely non-mystical nature, while his women patients repeatedly urge him to preserve the mysterious and supernatural aspects popularly associated with it. They insist that the sense of enchantment is part of the experience and that the occult atmosphere makes surrender both psychologically easier and socially permissible.

The novel draws on the well-known nineteenth-century archetype of "Richard Robinson," a young, well-dressed and educated man who moves easily between respectable society and its hidden erotic underworld. This figure originated in the 1836 murder of Helen Jewett, a beautiful young New York prostitute, whose death and subsequent trial of the accused young clerk, Richard Robinson, became one of the earliest media sensations of the penny press. By the 1890s the popular image of the hypnotist had become closely intertwined with the Robinson archetype. Hypnotists in fiction and in sensational journalism were often portrayed as the libertine seducer and fashionable dandy whose mastery of hypnosis granted them unusual access to the private thoughts and emotions of women and rivals. Parkyn would work hard to transform this image into the idea that the modern hypnotist was a disciplined figure who uses suggestion in a clear, non mystical way for practical and therapeutic purposes.

tennis tournament at Kenwood Country Club

Throughout their association, Parkyn and Flower remained closely tied to organized athletics. Roger Sherman, a longtime friend of Parkyn and secretary of the Kenwood Country Club, arranged for Flower to compete in championship tennis events at the club and for Parkyn to organize a hockey team under its auspices. Sherman was a former star football player for the Michigan Wolverines and also served as head coach of the Iowa Hawkeyes. He remained a close ally of Parkyn in later years, as an Assistant State's Attorney for Chicago and as president of the Illinois State Bar Association.

Sudduth links the Chicago School to mainstream medicine

Dr. W. Xavier Sudduth served as the principal link between the Chicago School of Psychology and mainstream medical institutions and scientific societies. While collaborating closely with Dr. Parkyn, Sudduth simultaneously held respected positions within orthodox medicine and professional institutions that allowed the School's work in hypnotism and suggestive therapeutics to circulate within established settings rather than remaining isolated at the margins.

Dr. Sudduth served as an extension lecturer for the University of Chicago, chairman of the Psychological Society of the Medico-Legal Society of New York, and professor of morbid psychology at the Chicago Post-Graduate Medical School. These roles placed him in direct professional contact with leading medical and psychological authorities. At the Post-Graduate Medical School, he worked alongside Dr. Mark Henry Lackersteen, one of Chicago's most prominent physicians, and within the Medico-Legal Society he worked directly with Thomson Jay Hudson. He was also a member of a large number of medical and scientific societies, both in this country and in Europe such as the Society for Psychical Research and the Chicago Esoteric Extension Association, which was devoted to the study of sacred books, mysticism, and the esoteric occult aspects of sociology, ethics, and philosophy.

By maintaining credibility within orthodox medical circles while actively collaborating with Parkyn on experimental and clinical work, Sudduth provided the Chicago School with legitimacy, visibility, and access to professional networks that would otherwise have been closed to it.

Dr. Mark Henry Lackersteen

Dr. Parkyn was deeply influenced in his study of yogic and Eastern mental traditions by Dr. M. H. Lackersteen, who had grown up in Calcutta and served for fifteen years as Surgeon-Major in the British Army in India during the Sepoy mutiny. Dr. Lackersteen moved to Chicago in the 1880s and was a key figure, along with his close friend, Jenkin Lloyd Jones, in organizing the Parliament of World's Religions at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Dr. Lackersteen was one of the most prominent physicians in Chicago and a founder and professor at the Chicago Post-Graduate Medical School, where Dr. Sudduth was professor of morbid psychology. He had a lifelong interest in hypnotism and became an early and influential supporter of Parkyn, acting as one of his strongest advocates in the city. Lackersteen also played a major role in securing the residence at 4020 Drexel Boulevard for the Chicago School of Psychology and lived next door at 4010 Drexel Boulevard. After Lackersteen's death in December 1897, Parkyn's adoption of the Astra pseudonym in mid-1898 served as a way to carry forward and publish ideas connected to Lackersteen's deeper knowledge of Eastern mental philosophy.

Mail course

Doctors and students from across the country praised the course for its clarity, practicality, and power. Many noted that it surpassed the works of Hippolyte Bernheim, Thomson Jay Hudson, and Charles Lloyd Tuckey, in its straight forward explanation of the scientific theory behind suggestion and its direct step-by-step methods that could be easily understood and applied.

Sacred Geometry

Drawing on Platonic philosophy, Parkyn referenced the association of the five elements with the five Platonic solids, which he considered as the pure geometric forms through which elemental forces are expressed in nature and in the structure of thought. He viewed this system as supporting the idea that health resulted from harmony between visible physical conditions and invisible mental and vital forces. He also connected this teaching to the Ayurvedic philosophy of the Pancha Bhuta, the five elements that make up all of creation in Hinduism.

Magnetic Cup

In mid-1900, Dr. Parkyn developed and patented a device he called the Magnetic Healing Cup, which he promoted as both a therapeutic instrument and an applied experiment in psychic and suggestive medicine. Advertisements frequently referred to it as "The last and greatest discovery of the nineteenth century." The device was marketed through the Magnetic Healing Cup Company, headquartered at offices at 4000 Cottage Grove Avenue in Chicago. Parkyn described the cup as a means of testing whether a physical object could intensify the effects of suggestion by giving patients a tangible focus for belief and expectation. He viewed the cup as a tool for concentrating what he called the vital healing force and directing it into the subconscious mind, with the act of drinking from it serving as a ritual designed to activate the body's natural recuperative processes.

The Magnetic Healing Cup was promoted as a scientific advance in suggestion-based healing. Parkyn claimed it could magnetize liquids, producing what he termed "liquid magnetism" or "liquid life." Promotional materials described the cup as containing an exceptionally strong magnetic force, asserted to be capable of moving large weights at a distance and generating a measurable magnetic field extending several feet. The magnetized liquid, prepared using a tasteless solution of magnetic metal salts, was said to carry this energy into the bloodstream, revitalizing the body, stimulating circulation, and restoring health by recharging the organism's vital force.

Parkyn distributed the cups without charge as part of a systematic effort to collect observational data. Patients were invited to write to him describing their ailments and, in return, received the cup along with detailed instructions and explanatory literature. This correspondence allowed Parkyn to gather reports on outcomes while simultaneously publicizing his broader system of psychic and mental healing. He also organized a network of agents to distribute the cups nationally, promoting them as drug-free, safe, and compatible with other forms of treatment. Although the device was marketed commercially, Parkyn presented the Magnetic Healing Cup as a controlled experiment intended to study how belief, when focused through a symbolic physical object, might enhance responsiveness to mental and suggestive therapeutic methods.

Chicago, the center of the growing "New Thought" movement

By the 1890s, Chicago had become a leading center for mental science, building on a movement that had been centered in Boston. In the mid-1880s, Emma Curtis Hopkins, a former student of Mary Baker Eddy, established her College of Christian Science in Chicago, helping to shift the movement westward. The 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago, further expanded this by bringing together Eastern and Western spiritual leaders and introducing themes of esotericism and the occult, with many of the participants from around the world remaining in the city afterward.

Parliament of World's Religions,1893, at the Chicago World's Fair

This setting provided a receptive audience for Parkyn’s work in suggestive therapeutics and for the development of the "Law of Suggestion" which taught that the power of thought shapes reality.

Magazines

In January 1898, it was renamed The Journal of Medical Hypnotism to distinguish it from unregulated healing movements and to support a growing network of affiliated schools. Later that year, it became The Journal of Suggestive Therapeutics, reflecting a shift completely away from the term "hypnotism," which the public had come to associate with ideas of the strange or even sinister.

Auto-Suggestion: What It Is and How to Use It for Health, Happiness and Success

A French print of Parkyn's Auto Suggestion, What It Is and How to Use It for Health, Happiness and Success.

In the fall of 1905, Parkyn published Auto-Suggestion: What It Is and How to Use It for Health, Happiness and Success. The book drew largely on articles he had contributed in recent years to Suggestion magazine, each examining the theory and practice of auto-suggestion. Parkyn presented auto-suggestion as a universal psychological mechanism behind all healing and personal transformation. Whether through medicine, faith, magnetic healing, or mental science, he argued, the real agent of change was the individual's belief, activated through auto-suggestion. He emphasized that the process operates continuously, both voluntarily and involuntarily, shaping health, behavior, emotions, and outcomes. Applied deliberately, it could overcome illness, banish fear, form new habits, and achieve personal goals. Mastery of this inner process, Parkyn stated, was the key to lasting well-being.

"The most practical, helpful little book in the English language" The Nautilus

Auto=Suggestion would become Parkyn's most successful and enduring publication. The book quickly gained wide recognition and became an influential text within the New Thought and mental science movements. Its appeal cut across audiences, from physicians and psychologists to everyday readers seeking tools for self-improvement. Within its first two years of publication, Auto-Suggestion sold more than thirty thousand copies.

Dr. Parkyn's call to mankind in Auto-Suggestion

"Let us arise, then, and see what we can do by new auto-suggestions to stamp out these old absurd notions, first in ourselves, and then, by precept and practice, endeavor to assist our fellow men to free themselves from self-imposed burdens." "Let us examine ourselves to discover the part played by superstitious, absurd childish impressions, and habits formed in childhood, in making us miserable or unhealthy, or in retarding our progress in this world. Then let us make ourselves over again by constantly repeated auto-suggestions in the form of affirmations that we are masters of our own destiny."

Coue

Charles Baudouin, Émile Coué’s closest collaborator, played a central role in documenting the relationship between Coué’s system and the earlier work of Dr. Parkyn. Baudouin, a French psychologist raised in Nancy near the original Nancy School, published Suggestion and Autosuggestion in 1920 as a formal psychological and educational treatment of Coué’s methods. Throughout the book, he repeatedly cited and quoted extensively from Parkyn’s earlier work Auto-Suggestion, explicitly crediting Parkyn with developing many of the techniques later associated with Coué’s system.

As Coué’s popularity expanded in the early 1920s, Parkyn publicly addressed these parallels. In 1923, he appeared on a nationally broadcast radio program to explain his original system of auto-suggestion and to distinguish it from Coué’s public demonstrations. Around the same time, he resumed publishing on the subject with Sydney B. Flower in their magazine The Thinker.

Parkyn attributed Coué’s dramatic public successes to his reliance on individuals Parkyn had earlier identified and classified as "suggestible somnambules," a highly receptive psychological type prone to rapid and striking responses to suggestion. According to Parkyn, Coué’s clinics and demonstrations consistently drew upon this group, whose compliance created the appearance of universal effectiveness. Parkyn emphasized that true auto-suggestion required conscious self-control and self-mastery rather than passive responsiveness to another’s influence. This assessment was also supported by an interview of Coué conducted in 1922 by Claude William Chamberlain, a former student of Parkyn, who stated that Coué’s success depended largely on his ability, conscious or not, to select such highly suggestible subjects.

Parkyn’s big business ventures

Alongside his work in teaching and publishing, Parkyn was actively involved in large-scale business enterprises. His deeply held belief was that wealth could be directed toward broader social change, aiming to help create an new economic system in which individuals could "enjoy life and the freedom of happiness unhampered by artificial conditions created by inimical legislation and predatory trusts." His business ventures reflected this belief, combining cooperative enterprise models, patented innovations aimed at reshaping industry, and transportation and distribution systems intended to expand access across previously undeveloped regions.

The Motzorongo Plantation Company

Main article: The Motzorongo Plantation Company

In 1902, Parkyn helped found the Motzorongo Plantation Company, a major agricultural enterprise in Veracruz, Mexico. Parkyn served as president and principal promoter, while his father, James Parkyn, acted as general manager overseeing operations in Mexico. The companies holdings expanded to approximately 360,000 acres, over 560 square miles, making it the largest American-controlled agricultural property in Mexico at the time. It was promoted as a cooperative enterprise, emphasizing shared benefit among investors, management, and laborers rather than a purely profit-driven structure.

In 1914, the plantation drew national attention during the Motzorongo Incident, when false reports that General Victoriano Huerta’s troops had captured and executed twenty American employees nearly triggered conflict between the United States and Mexico.

The Black Sand and Gold Recovery Company

Main article: The Black Sand and Gold Recovery Company

In 1906, Parkyn organized the Black Sand and Gold Recovery Company that was centered on the use of the Lovett Magnetic Separator, a patented device developed by Chicago engineer Thomas J. Lovett, who lived directly across the street from Parkyn. The machine was designed to extract gold, iron, and other valuable minerals from black sand deposits. By 1909 it was supplying placer mining operations across the western states and to meet demand, it established manufacturing facilities in Denver and Salt Lake City.

Parkyn’s involvement with the Lovett Magnetic Separator begun earlier when in 1903 he helped organize the North Shore Reduction Company in Canada and promoted the venture through New Thought magazine with Sydney B. Flower as fiscal agent.

The Southwestern Pacific Railroad Company

In 1914, Parkyn became a central partner in the Southwestern Pacific Railroad Company. The enterprise was a large-scale rail and industrial project designed to connect Denver and Salt Lake City to the Pacific coast at San Diego as part of a broader integrated system of transportation, industry, and land development. Parkyn served as first vice president and director and was the largest individual investor, contributing nearly $2 million in cash in 1914.

Despite having received approval from the Department of the Interior, including rights-of-way, options on 8 million acres, federal subsidies, and access to land for irrigation and settlement, the 2,200-mile, $105 million railroad and industrial project stalled in mid-1915 when the outbreak of the First World War disrupted supply lines and expected European financing.

The Motzorongo Plantation Company

An ad by James Parkyn in his brother-in-law's Eau Claire Leader newspaper

Beginning in 1902, Dr. Parkyn and his father, James Parkyn, became involved in large-scale agricultural investment ventures in Mexico during a period of widespread American enthusiasm for tropical land development. The initial phase followed successful mining investments made by Parkyn's cousin, Horatio Nelson Jackson, and soon expanded into agriculture with the formation of the La Luisa Plantation Association in the Veracruz district. Dr. Parkyn served on the board of the association, while his father acted as its principal promoter.

Elizabeth Towne's editorial on the Parkyn and Flower stock investment ads in The Nautilus

This marked the first sustained use of Parkyn’s publishing network to promote investment ventures. Advertisements soliciting the stock subscriptions for the La Luisa Plantation Association began appearing in Suggestion magazine in mid-1902 and were also featured prominently in the June 1902 issue of The Nautilus, alongside investment advertisements placed by Sydney B. Flower, occupying much of the final page. This shift in The Nautilus’ advertising prompted an editorial response from its editor, Elizabeth Towne. She cited favorable reports from James Parkyn following his inspection of the property and stated that both Parkyn and Flower were honorable and capable men, expressing optimism about the potential returns on her own investments.

Strong investor response allowed the expansion into the much larger Motzorongo Plantation, a 165,000-acre estate reorganized as the Motzorongo Plantation Company and promoted as a cooperative enterprise. Parkyn continued to use his magazine to market shares and organize inspection trips, raising over $250,000 from readers. The company’s board included prominent figures such as Harry W. Huttig and Edgar Young Mullins, lending additional financial and institutional credibility.

The company later expanded to approximately 360,000 acres, over 560 square miles, with the acquisition of the neighboring Hacienda Josefina. James Parkyn remained in Mexico as general manager and died there of typhoid fever in 1909. In 1914, the Motzorongo Plantation drew national attention during the Motzorongo Incident, when false reports that General Victoriano Huerta’s troops had captured and executed twenty American employees nearly triggered conflict between the United States and Mexico.

The Southwestern Pacific Railroad Enterprise

In November 1913, Herbert A. Parkyn and Harry W. Huttig became the central financial and organizational figures in the formation of the Southwestern Pacific Railroad, a large rail and industrial project intended to connect Denver and Salt Lake City with the Pacific coast at San Diego. Parkyn and Huttig had partnered on the project with its promoter, Rollo Eugent Clapp, a civil engineer who had spent several years surveying the Colorado River basin and adjacent territories in preparation for railroad development.

An integrated rail-industrial system

Map of the proposed Southwestern Pacific Railroad

The Southwestern Pacific Railroad was planned as part of an integrated rail-industrial system spanning 2,200 miles of track at an estimated cost of $105 million. The route was designed to serve coal fields in western Colorado and southern Utah and iron deposits in Washington and Iron counties, Utah, with affiliated plans for coal processing facilities, a major steel plant in southern Utah estimated to cost $20 million, and additional steel production at San Diego. Large irrigation projects were also included, covering more than 700,000 acres, to support agriculture, industrial water needs, and land development along the line, with expenditures estimated at $22 million. The overall enterprise was estimated as a “billion-dollar affair.”

Incorporation

David Charles Collier

In 1914, articles of incorporation were filed for the Southwestern Pacific Railroad in California and Utah. Parkyn was the dominant shareholder in the enterprise, with 21,000 shares valued at $2.1 million, paid as $1.9 million in cash and $200,000 in property consisting of surveys, maps, engineering plans, and compiled data relating to the proposed territory it would traverse. David Charles Collier, a San Diego industrialist and former director general and president of the Panama-California Exposition, served as president of the railroad. Parkyn was named vice president and director. Other officers and directors included; Parkyn's longtime business associate Harry W. Huttig; Charles C. Carnahan, a prominent Chicago attorney active in corporate and civic affairs; and Thomas Marioneaux, a former judge with long experience in the railroad industry who served as resident director in Utah. Rollo E. Clapp was appointed chief engineer.

Stephen Tyng Mather, joins the Department of the Interior

Stephen Tyng Mather

In early 1915 the Department of the Interior became directly involved in reviewing the requests for rights-of-way for the Southwestern Pacific Railroad under Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane. In April 1915, the principal figures connected with the railroad, including Parkyn, Carnahan, Huttig, and Clapp, held a farewell dinner at the Union League Club for Stephen Tyng Mather on the eve of his departure to Washington, D.C., where he was to assume duties as Assistant Secretary of the Interior. Mather, a millionaire industrialist through his ownership of the Thorkildsen-Mather Borax Company and later the first director of the National Park Service, was a longtime Chicago associate of Carnahan and Parkyn. Later that year the requests from the Southwestern Pacific Railroad were approved by the Department of the Interior, including rights-of-way, options on 8 million acres of public and grazing land along the route at $1.25 and acre, Federal subsidies for construction of the railroad, and access to government land to support irrigation and settlement.

World War I stopped the financing of the enterprise

Despite advanced planning and formal organization, the project stalled in mid-1915. The outbreak of the First World War disrupted European capital that had been expected to finance a substantial portion of the railroad. In June 1915, Clapp resigned as chief engineer, stating that wartime conditions made the financing of a transcontinental railroad impracticable. The company announced that no effort would be made to finance or construct the line until after the conclusion of the war. While the officers and directors, including Parkyn and Collier, remained formally in place, the Southwestern Pacific Railroad enterprise was not started again after the war.

Parkyn Legacy

Parkyn's legacy rests in his role as one of the earliest architects of modern suggestive therapeutics and auto-suggestion in North America. Decades before these ideas achieved international popularity, he had already developed a structured, clinical system integrating psychology, medicine, and disciplined mental training. Through his schools, journals, correspondence courses, experiments, and later radio work, he shaped a generation of practitioners and publishers in the mental sciences. Although many of his methods were later repackaged or popularized by others, his influence persisted through the institutions he founded, the students he trained, and the language and techniques that became foundational to twentieth-century self-help and applied psychology movements.

Parkyn's wife, Aura Parks, commits suicide

On December 18, 1902, Dr. Parkyn married Aura L. Parks, a wealthy young widow heiress who had come to him initially as a patient, seeking treatment for melancholia that followed the suicide of her husband. In 1896, at the age of twenty-seven, Aura had married Robert W. Hamer, the president of the Chicago and North-Western Railroad who was sixty four years old. In October 1897, Hamer committed suicide by shooting himself in the heart. Aura had discovered his body and the shock initiated a prolonged period of severe trauma. Parkyn treated her for approximately two years before their marriage.

Newspaper article slandering Dr. Herbert A. Parkyn in the case of his wife's suicide. The accusations would later be proven false and a full retraction with an apology would be printed.

In April 1905, just over two years after their marriage, Aura also took her own life. Less than a year earlier, the death of her mother had triggered a serious recurrence of her melancholia. While traveling in Indiana to visit her mother's grave, Aura registered at the Barnett Hotel, dressed for the evening, and summoned the bellboy. As he knocked at the door, she lay down on the floor and shot herself with a revolver purchased earlier that day. She left a letter addressed to Dr. Parkyn stating, "You are tired of me… it is best that I stand in your way no longer… I regret nothing."

From the first headlines, the case was treated as a scandal. Newspapers across the Midwest and nationally accused Dr. Parkyn of neglect, of infidelity, of exploiting his wife financially, and of hypnotizing her to suicide. Other reports asserted that he refused to view her body at the morgue and that her wealth had been diverted into Mexican mining and plantation ventures. These claims appeared under bold headlines such as "Jealousy the Cause of Suicide" and "What Drove Mrs. Parkyn to Suicide?," long before the facts were known.

These allegations were later proven false. Sworn statements, affidavits, and official records established the confirmed facts of the case. Aura's attorney verified that the estate inherited from her first husband remained intact, was held in trust, and had not been accessed or controlled by Dr. Parkyn. Statements from the undertaker and other witnesses confirmed that Parkyn was present immediately following her death, personally attended to her remains, and viewed her body without delay. Friends and relatives testified that Aura retained control over her own property and that there were no disputes over money. Financial records further demonstrated that Dr. Parkyn's personal income substantially exceeded Aura's, contradicting claims that he depended upon or exploited her wealth.

A full retraction of the slander of Dr. Herbert A. Parkyn and the case of his wife Aura Parks' suicide.

It was also shown that Aura's will had been executed more than a year before her death and that she left the bulk of her estate to Rev. Jenkin Lloyd Jones of All Souls Church for missionary and philanthropic purposes. Aura had been studying at All Souls Church under Jones for two years prior to her death. The will stated that her husband, Dr. Parkyn, had sufficient means of his own. Although Dr. Parkyn had the legal right as her husband to contest the will or claim a substantial portion of the estate, he chose not to challenge it. Rev. Jenkin Lloyd Jones was a professional and personal associate of Parkyn and had been a close personal friend of the late Dr. M. H. Lackersteen, one of Parkyn's strongest early supporters.

Following the exposure of false reporting, The Star Press, one of the principal newspapers responsible for the accusations, issued a full retraction and formal apology, acknowledging that its coverage had been inaccurate and had unjustly damaged Dr. Parkyn's reputation.

Suggestive Therapeutics and Auto-Suggestion

The psychological framework that later entered New Thought through the language of affirmation, mental discipline, and self-transformation can be traced to the clinical work of the nineteenth century Nancy School in France. Physicians such as Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault and Hippolyte Bernheim advanced the position that hypnosis was a normal psychological state governed by suggestion rather than by occult force.

In the United States, these clinical principles were first institutionalized at the Chicago School of Psychology, founded in 1896 by Herbert A. Parkyn. At a time when much of New Thought operated through churches and independent lecturers, the Chicago School framed mental influence in clinical and instructional terms, using the language of scientific psychology rather than theology. Its teaching emphasized that suggestion operated according to fixed mental laws that were termed the Law of Suggestion.

Emerging from the Chicago School of Psychology were figures who carried its teachings far beyond the clinic and classroom. Among the most prominent was William Walker Atkinson, who translated the school’s clinical principles of suggestive therapeutics into broader concepts of thought force, personal magnetism, and will development, presenting them as practical methods for everyday life rather than techniques confined to therapeutic treatment. Atkinson also joined with another of the school’s leading protégés, Sydney B. Flower, to establish New Thought magazine, which became the most influential journal of the movement.

In 1905, Parkyn’s Auto-Suggestion set out the first sustained, systematic presentation of self-directed suggestion in American mental science. Building on the mental science formulations advanced by his close family friend Henry Wood in Ideal Suggestion Through Mental Photography (1893), Parkyn framed repeated affirmation and disciplined thought as a deliberate method for reshaping character, health, and circumstance, supplying what became the practical backbone of New Thought’s self-empowerment ethos.

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Artificial somnambulism and hypnotic suggestion likewise influenced the New Thought movement, which grew out of the teachings of the American mesmerist Phineas P. Quimby (1802–1866). It revolved around the concept of "mind over matter," believing that illness and other negative conditions could be cured through the power of belief. Quimby’s teachings also provided the conceptual foundation for the emergence of Christian Science. In the late nineteenth century, these currents were further systematized through the teaching of suggestive therapeutics, as first developed by the Nancy School in France under physicians Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault and Hippolyte Bernheim who treated hypnosis as a psychological process governed by suggestion rather than as a mystical force. In 1896, Herbert A. Parkyn established the Chicago School of Psychology, the first American institution devoted specifically to instruction in hypnotism, suggestion, and auto-suggestion. Drawing directly on these European clinical models, the school presented mental influence as a psychological law rather than solely a spiritual principle. Through its graduates and associated publications, these techniques entered mainstream New Thought literature, contributing to the movement’s increasingly structured and scientific articulation of mental causation.

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New Thought writings

By the turn of the twentieth century, Wilcox had become closely associated with the ideas of the New Thought movement, and her poetry increasingly reflected its themes of affirmation, mental causation, and spiritual progress. Because of her national fame and the presence of New Thought ideas in her work, her poems were widely reprinted in journals aligned with the movement, making her one of its most recognizable literary voices. In 1902, this prominence led to her association with the circle surrounding Herbert A. Parkyn’s Chicago School of Psychology and its affiliated ventures.

During this period, she authored the poetry collection The Heart of the New Thought, published by the Psychic Research Company in conjunction with William Walker Atkinson’s The Law of the New Thought. She was subsequently brought on as co-editor of New Thought magazine also alongside Atkinson. Her name appeared prominently on the cover and in promotional materials, and her presence gave the magazine immediate national visibility. The publication soon became one of the most influential journals of the New Thought movement.

In addition to her editorial leadership, Wilcox contributed to other leading New Thought periodicals, including The Nautilus and Suggestion, helping to popularize the movement’s doctrines and principles for a broad readership. By 1915 her booklet What I Know About New Thought had reportedly reached a distribution of 50,000 copies, according to its publisher, Elizabeth Towne.

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Sales management and The Chicago School of Salesmanship

After graduation Sheldon entered the employ of the Werner Company, working as a traveling salesman selling educational books door to door. During this period he traveled widely, selling works such as Encyclopedia Americana, Waldorf Cook Book, Webster's Dictionary, Encyclopædia Britannica, Library of the World's Best Literature and his best seller, Happy Homes and the Hearts That Make Them. He canvassed remote territories, including Wyoming ranch country, at times traveling by bicycle and later exchanging it for a cow pony in order to reach isolated customers.

Sheldon proved so successful that the Syndicate Publishing Company placed him in charge of a branch office, where he was responsible for training and managing young book agents for field work. In 1896 he was promoted to general sales manager in Chicago, exercising supervision over offices throughout the United States and Canada.

During this period, one of Sheldon’s closest associates and most effective field agents was Frank H. Dukesmith. Together they directed several campaigns and promotions that achieved notable success for the company. Both men were serious students of what was then coming to be called "salesmanship." They analyzed the causes of success and failure in the field and came to believe that salesmanship rested upon principles that could be systematically organized and taught. Sheldon was influenced by the theoretical psychology he had encountered during his university years and by Blackstone’s systematic treatment of the common law of England. He rejected the prevailing commercial doctrine of "let the buyer beware," arguing instead that profit must be joined to service in the public interest. His growing interest in the "new psychology" then gaining prominence in Chicago led him and Dukesmith to form an association with Dr. Herbert A. Parkyn of the Chicago School of Psychology.

The Chicago School of Salesmanship

For several years Dr. Parkyn had been developing the application of suggestion to advertising, and there was increasing demand among students at his Chicago School for systematic instruction in its commercial use. Dr. Parkyn regarded advertising and salesmanship as powerful suggestive forces in modern life, capable of shaping public thought for good or ill. He, however, chose not to incorporate such training formally into the curriculum of his medical school, seeking to avoid public controversy or accusations that he was employing hypnotic methods in the marketplace.

Instead, Parkyn supported the organization of a separate school grounded in the principles of suggestion and aimed at elevating professional standards and promoting greater integrity within salesmanship. In the spring of 1898, the Chicago School of Salesmanship was founded at 269 Dearborn St in the Boylston Building. It was the first commercial school in America dedicated specifically to teaching the science of salesmanship.

Frank H. Dukesmith prepared the course manual, titled The Philosophy of Salesmanship, drawing upon ideas he and Sheldon had been developing as well as the science of suggestive psychology taught at Parkyn’s Chicago School. W. J. Chatterton, a close associate of Parkyn who had assisted in opening affiliated branches of the Chicago School of Psychology in other cities, was brought onto the faculty as instructor in psychology.

This first incarnation of a school devoted to the science of salesmanship lasted only about six months and had ceased by September 1898. Sheldon, who had been working in support of Dukesmith in connection with the school, was soon offered an opportunity by his uncle, Charles Cyril Post, to relocate to Sea Breeze, Florida, and establish a publishing company to distribute literature associated with the hugely successful mental science colony founded there by Post and his wife, Helen Wilmans Post. Dukesmith, who had served as the public face of the school while also working for the Obenchain & Boyer fire extinguisher company, was bought out by Sheldon and Parkyn, who retained ownership of the course manual and the school’s name. The following month, Dukesmith purchased a fifty-acre farm near his hometown in West Virginia for $3,750.

Sea Breeze and the Mental Science Association

In 1898 Sheldon moved with his wife and child to Sea Breeze, Florida, where his uncle Charles Cyril Post and Helen Wilmans Post, had established a mental science colony.

Helen Wilmans Post was a prominent New Thought author, and advocate of mental science who taught that mind was the governing force behind health, character, and material conditions. Through her magazine Freedom, she had a large medical practice of what was termed "absent treatment," a system of healing conducted through directed mental concentration rather than physical presence. Sheldon's uncle, Charles Cyril Post, was a former newspaper publisher and political figure who was the principal associate in the colony. He assisted in managing its publications, business affairs, and organizational expansion.

Soon afterward, he left his position with the Werner Company and joined his uncle at Sea Breeze, Florida.

The Origin of the AIDA Model

For much of the twentieth century, the AIDA model of Attention, Interest, Desire, Action, was widely been attributed to E. St. Elmo Lewis. That attribution rests primarily on a statement published in 1925 by Edward K. Strong, Jr. who asserted that Lewis had formulated much of the model in 1898 and then added the instruction to "get action" later. However, no primary document from 1898 was cited to support the claim. While marketing textbooks and academic works over the years have repeated this attribution without verification, modern historical research has challenged this narrative and demonstrated that no writings by Lewis from the late 1890s contain the AIDA formulation. Lewis’s earliest work from 1899 referred to catching the eye of the reader, informing him, and making a customer of him, but there is no documentary evidence of Lewis using the sequence until 1908.

By contrast, printed evidence from Chicago in 1898 shows that Arthur F. Sheldon and Frank H. Dukesmith were already using several of the elements in a defined mental progression. When the Chicago School of Salesmanship opened in May 1898, its curriculum described selling as a psychological process requiring the securing of attention, the creation of desire, and the obtaining of the order. Contemporary coverage of the school’s opening in August 1898 outlines these elements explicitly, reflecting material drawn from the course manual that had been under development for at least a year. This places the structured formulation of several of the elements in existence as early as 1897.

After Dukesmith was bought out of the Chicago School of Salesmanship in late 1898, the framework was carried forward rather than newly invented for the relaunch of the school in 1903. In the first edition of The Science of Successful Salesmanship (1903), it states that "the mind of the customer must pass along a mental path of four steps: attention, interest, desire and resolve to buy.”

The "Will" is defined as the faculty of "decision and action" and it's repeatedly emphasized that no sale is complete until action is secured. Throughout the text, the movement from attention to interest, from interest to desire, and from desire to decision and action is described not as a slogan but as a fixed psychological law governing every successful sale.

The same structure appears independently in Dukesmith’s later work. In 1903 he founded the magazine Salesmanship in Meadville, Pennsylvania, devoted to advancing the Science of Salesmanship. Its editorials repeatedly used the progression of attention, interest, desire, and conviction in model form, presenting the sequence as the normal mental order through which a sale must pass

Parkyn’s Law of Suggestion and the AIDA sequence

The sequence was developed in close association with Dr. Parkyn’s Chicago School of Psychology, where he taught that the mind operates according to a fixed psychological order by which "thoughts take form in action."

In Parkyn's Mail Course in Suggestive Therapeutics and Hypnotism (1898), he defined attention as the motor force of this process with the voluntary mind directing it. Attention being the first of the sequence because every action begins with selection. At any moment the mind is confronted with innumerable impressions and possible ideas. Only those that receive attention become represented in consciousness. Without attention, there is no deliberate evaluation, no valuation, and no willed movement.

When attention is held, it becomes an interest and not just a mere notice. With interest the mind will return to the same thought, examine it, repeat it, and keep it active. This sustained and repeated fixation increases the suggestibility of the involuntary mind. As interest deepens and the idea becomes connected with personal value, it becomes desire. Desire is interest charged with motive force. At this stage the thought has been impressed upon the involuntary mind and moves toward action. Parkyn’s axiom that "thoughts take form in action" describes this final movement when sustained and energized thought externalizes and creates reality. Parkyn presented this as a general law of mental operation.

In his 1898 Mail Course, Parkyn gives examples of suggestions that move deliberately in the sequence from attention, to intensifying interest, to awakening desire, and finally to the principle that thought "takes form in action." The salesmanship curriculum translated that same psychological progression into commercial terms.

Expansion of the AIDA model to AIDAS

Sheldon is credited with expanding the classic AIDA model into what he termed AIDAS. His addition of the fifth stage, Satisfaction, shifted the emphasis from securing a single transaction to cultivating lasting commercial relationships within what he described as a broader "Science of Business Building." He first introduced the formulation in his 1911 book Successful Selling.

Sheldon taught that the buyer’s mind passes through identifiable stages in the process of purchase. First, favorable attention must be secured so that the prospect is receptive to the presentation. Attention then develops into interest, often strengthened through demonstration or illustration. Interest deepens into desire, at which point objections must be addressed so that the customer feels genuine need for the product. Action follows when the prospect commits to purchase. Sheldon argued, however, that the process did not end there. The final and essential stage was satisfaction, achieved by reassuring the buyer after the sale and ensuring that expectations were fulfilled.

In The Business Philosopher, Sheldon maintained that satisfaction was the foundation of enduring success. A single sale, he argued, had little long-term value unless it produced permanent satisfaction and repeat patronage. He framed the seller’s role as that of a counselor rather than a manipulator, asserting that profit was the natural byproduct of service.

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In Salesmanship: A Monthly Magazine, edited by Dukesmith, the sales process was explicitly broken down into “securing attention,” “arousing interest,” “creating desire,” and “closing the sale.” Dukesmith initially used “closing the sale” and later “conviction” as the final stage, presenting the sequence as a structured psychological progression required in every transaction.

At the same time, Sheldon, through The Sheldon School of Scientific Salesmanship, was teaching the four mental stages of “Attention,” “Interest,” “Desire,” and “Resolve” or “Decision and Action.” In his instructional texts from 1903 through 1910, Sheldon repeatedly described these stages as universal mental states that must occur in every sale. By 1910, he explicitly listed “Attention, Interest, Desire, Action” as essential components of the sales process. Sheldon emphasized that the final act of decision and action was indispensable, distinguishing his formulation from versions that ended with “conviction.”

Iwamoto concluded that Dukesmith and Sheldon—not Lewis—were decisive in the model’s formulation. Dukesmith systematized the four stages within sales practice, while Sheldon recognized the theoretical necessity of the final behavioral step and completed the model by integrating “Action” as the essential fourth element. On the basis of documentary evidence from 1903 to 1910, Sheldon has been identified as the most substantiated originator of the AIDA model in its completed form.

Parkyn’s Law of Suggestion and the AIDA sequence

Parkyn’s most widely repeated maxim in his Suggestion magazine

The sequence was developed in close association with Dr. Parkyn’s Chicago School of Psychology, where he taught that the mind operates according to a fixed psychological order by which "thoughts take form in action."

In Parkyn's Mail Course in Suggestive Therapeutics and Hypnotism (1898), he defined attention as the motor force of this process with the voluntary mind directing it. Attention being the first of the sequence because every action begins with selection. At any moment the mind is confronted with innumerable impressions and possible ideas. Only those that receive attention become represented in consciousness. Without attention, there is no deliberate evaluation, no valuation, and no willed movement.

When attention is sustained, it becomes interest. Interest is not mere notice but repeated fixation upon an idea. The mind returns to it, examines it, and keeps it active. This sustained and repeated fixation increases the suggestibility of the involuntary mind.

As interest deepens and the idea becomes connected with personal value, it becomes desire. Desire is interest charged with motive force. At this stage the thought has been impressed upon the involuntary mind and moves toward action.

The final stage is action. Parkyn’s most famous axiom that "thoughts take form in action" describes the culmination of the process. Sustained and energized thought externalizes and creates reality. This was presented not as metaphor but as a natural law of mental operation.

In his 1898 Mail Course, Parkyn gives examples of suggestions that move deliberately in the sequence from attention, to intensifying interest, to awakening desire, and finally to the principle that thought "takes form in action." The salesmanship curriculum translated that same psychological progression into commercial terms.