It was around this time, as Susan Cain has famously documented, that the provost of Harvard University began instructing admissions officers to reject applications from ‘sensitive’ applicants and instead offer places to ‘healthy, extroverted’ ones. There were new runaway bestsellers, American retellings of the Samuel Smiles narrative that had arteries of Mind Cure and faith healing running deep within them: How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (‘Men and women can banish worry, fear and various kinds of illnesses, and can transform their lives by changing their thoughts. I
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