228 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Thy teeth shall pain thee no more. 

 In the name of the Father, Son and the 

 Holy Ghost! 



Why should it be more difficult to believe that toothaches have been 

 cured by each and every one of these methods as promptly as by the 

 sight of a dentist's forceps? The therapeutic agent in each case is the 

 same. It is psychical, and we call it " suggestion." 



But if a toothache can be cured by psychotherapy, why not the 

 ague? That too has often been done. Can modern psychotherapy 

 produce a prettier illustration of the method of auto-suggestion than 

 this — described in an old Saxon medical book? We are told that the 

 sick man wrote the words "Febra Fuge" (fly away, fever) on a piece 

 of paper and, beginning with the last letter, cut off a letter each day. 

 The fever abated day by day and when the letter " F " finally fell, the 

 ague disappeared. Fifty others, besides the narrator, were cured the 

 same year by this method ! 



As the virtue of a dose of medicine does not depend upon the kind 

 of spoon in which it is conveyed to the patient's lips so, a different way 

 of administering suggestion for the ague proves in New England to-day 

 of equal potency with that described by the early English .writer. The 

 patient goes out with a friend and looks on while the friend cuts down 

 willow rods corresponding in number to the hour of the day. Each rod 

 must then be burnt singly and as the last one turns to ashes the dis- 

 tressing symptoms disappear. 



Among the country people of modern England a variety of devices 

 for circumventing the ague are known. If you peg a lock of your hair 

 into an oak and give a sudden jerk with your head, your ague will be 

 transferred to the oak. Or, to mention only one other, you may take 

 nine or eleven snails, string them on a thread, saying with each slimy 

 bead, " Here I leave my ague." Frizzle them over a fire and as the 

 snails disappear, so will your ague. 



Observe how the last method accords with modern scientific psycho- 

 therapy. The practitioners of the Emmanuel movement tell us, in 

 " Eeligion and Medicine," that when giving one's self a verbal auto- 

 suggestion, it is well to accompany the words with some action, how- 

 ever trifling and absurd — the absurdity of the action, in fact, being 

 rather something in its favor. For example, when you say to yourself : 

 "I put away all worry," you might put an old shoe out of sight and 

 think of your worry as staying with the shoe. The snail cure for ague 

 obviously anticipates these directions. It takes advantage, moreover, 

 in a very cunning way of another psychological discovery — the hypnotic 

 influence of bright light when stared at fixedly. Most people now-a-days 

 are familiar with this phenomenon from their experience in staring at 

 strongly illuminated stereopticon screens. They know how difficult it 



