PSYCHOTHERAPY IN FOLK-MEDICINE 229 



is to keep awake — unless the lecture is unusually exciting. Now, sug- 

 gestion is most effective on persons who are in a somnolent or hypnotic 

 condition, and your credulous rustic, staring into the fire as the snails 

 sizzle and repeating to himself, " Here I leave my ague," is performing 

 a very pretty psychological experiment on strictly scientific lines. 



Scientific psychotherapy has undoubtedly taken this hint of rein- 

 forcing verbal suggestion with a trivial action from popular practise. 

 The device is perhaps best known in popular medicine as applied to the 

 cure of warts. You strike the wart downwards three times with the 

 knot of a reed as you make your auto-suggestion, or, you rub it seven 

 times with the third finger of the left hand in the direction in which 

 the sun moves; or, you wet your forefinger with saliva and stroke the 

 wart in the direction of a passing funeral ; or, you touch each wart with 

 a pebble, place the pebbles in a bag and lose them — the finder getting the 

 warts ; or, you tie as many knots in a hair as you have warts and throw 

 the hair away ; or, you steal a piece of bacon, rub the wart and slip the 

 bacon under the bark of an ash tree, thus causing the warts to disappear 

 from your hand and appear on the bark ; or, you get another, by hook or 

 by crook, to count your warts, when they will pass over to him. 



Let it not be supposed that the foregoing remedies are merely pre- 

 scriptions, but not cures. Innumerable experiments have been made 

 with them by persons who sincerely believed in their efficacy, and the 

 evidence of their success is as abundant as that of the success of more 

 academic methods. The great variety of methods — and those enumer- 

 ated do not begin to exhaust the list — shows that the particular differ- 

 ences between them 'are of no consequence, but that any device based 

 upon the faith of the patient may be employed to utilize the control 

 which the mind, under certain circumstances, may exercise over the so- 

 called vegetative processes of the human system. That the most power- 

 ful suggestion may fail of its object is, of course, perfectly well-known. 

 A case is reported of a German peasant, unpleasantly endowed with too 

 many warts, who stood on his head in a newly made grave. To a super- 

 stitious yokel this was an extremely powerful suggestion, but the warts 

 remained. 



Any one who is of the opinion that these remedies for warts can not 

 be effective because they are so little countenanced by scientific medical 

 authority, will see the matter in a new light if he will take the trouble to 

 look up the remedies that are recommended by the medical authorities 

 themselves. A standard medical work (Foster's " Eeference Handbook 

 of the Medical Sciences") names a few of them and dismisses the rest 

 with the remark that they are too numerous to mention, as every 

 physician has his favorite remedy. The diversity among these remedies 

 being as great as among the popular cures, the inference seems justified 

 that there is nothing inherently curative in the one class any more than 



