Herbert Benson

Herbert Benson (April 24, 1935 – February 3, 2022) was an American medical doctor, cardiologist, and founder of the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston.

He was a professor of mind/body medicine at Harvard Medical School and director emeritus of the Benson-Henry Institute (BHI) at MGH.

He was a founding trustee of The American Institute of Stress.

He contributed more than 190 scientific publications and 12 books.

More than five million copies of his books have been printed in different languages.

Benson was born on April 24, 1935, in Yonkers, New York.

He graduated with B.A. in biology from Wesleyan University in 1957.

In the 1960s at Harvard Medical School, Benson pioneered mind-body research, focusing on stress and the relaxation response in medicine.

In his research, the mind and body are one system, in which meditation can play a significant role in reducing stress responses.

He continued to pioneer medical research into bodymind questions.

He introduced the term relaxation response as a scientific alternative for meditation.

According to him, relaxation response is the ability of the body to induce decreased activity of muscle and organs.

It is an opposite reaction to the fight-or-flight response.

With Robert Keith Wallace, he observed that Transcendental Meditation reduced metabolism, rate of breathing, heart rate, and brain activity.

He entered a medical course at Harvard Medical School and earned his MD degree in 1961.

He continued postdoctoral programs at King County Hospital, Seattle; University Hospital, University of Washington, Seattle; National Heart Institute, Bethesda; University of Puerto Rico; and Thorndike Memorial Laboratory, Boston City Hospital.

In 1969 he was appointed instructor in physiology and later instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School.

He was promoted to assistant professor of medicine the next year.

From 1972 he became associate professor.

He was a practicing physician at Beth Israel Hospital from 1974.

He was appointed associate professor at the Beth Israel Hospital in 1977, the post he held until 1987.

Then he returned to the medical faculty at Harvard.

Benson became founding president of the Mind/Body Medical Institute of Harvard Medical School in 1988.

Between 1990 and 1997 he was lecturer in medicine and religion at Andover Newton Theological School, Newton Centre.

With the establishment of Mind/Body Medical Institute at Harvard in 1992, he became associate professor, and then full professor.

Started in 1998, Benson became the leader of the so-called "Great Prayer Experiment," or technically the "Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP)."

In 1998, Benson started a research project on the efficacy of prayer among patients undergoing coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery.

The project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation, was explicit that its objective was not to prove or disprove the existence of God.

This "Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP)" became popularly known as the "Great Prayer Experiment" and was described as "the most intense investigation ever undertaken of whether prayer can help to heal illness."

The trial attempted to differentiate among outcomes in three groups of patients: (1) those uncertain of whether they were being prayed for, who were; (2) those uncertain of whether they were being prayed for, who were not; and (3) those being prayed for who were certain of it.

The result published in 2006 concluded that intercessory prayer has no beneficial effect on patients with coronary artery bypass graft surgery.

He, however, continued to believe that prayer has positive health benefits.

Benson coined relaxation response (and wrote a book by the same title) as a scientific term for the reversion of the physical stress response that can be elicited by meditation, and he used it to describe the ability of the body to stimulate relaxation of muscle and organs.

He founded the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine of the Massachusetts General Hospital in 2006, where he became its director.

Benson died from heart disease and kidney failure at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, on February 3, 2022, at the age of 86.

The conclusion, published in 2006, was that intercessory prayer has no beneficial effect on CABG patients.

Indeed, certainty of receiving intercessory prayer was actually associated with a higher incidence of complications.

Benson married Marilyn Benson, and they had two children, Jennifer and Gregory.