In 1945, due to an accident during combat, he was left partially blind with injured optic nerves and lame from hip and back injuries, L. Ron Hubbard was hospitalised at Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland, California. Among the 5,000 Naval and Marine Corps patients were hundreds of former American prisoners freed from Japanese camps on South Pacific islands. Many were in terrible condition from starvation and not able to absorb protein.

Navy doctors were administering testosterone, a male hormone, to solve this problem. But this medical treatment was not getting effective results on all patients, and L. Ron Hubbard took the opportunity to not only help his fellow servicemen, but to test the application of a theory he had developed.

“All I was trying to establish,” he wrote, “was whether or not the mind regulated the body or the body regulated the mind. Therefore, if on some of these patients hormones did not work and on some of them they did, there might be a mental reason. If those patients on whom it did not work had a severe mental block, then it was obvious that regardless of the amount of hormone or medical treatment the person received, he would not get well. If the mind were capable of putting this much restraint upon the physical body then obviously the fact that was commonly held to be true, that structure monitors function, would be false. I set out to prove this. . . . I was not interested in endocrinology but in resolving whether or not function monitored structure or structure monitored function.”