Tregear. — Inaugural Address. 621 



blister would appear. In twenty-four hours, when the dress- 

 ing was removed, the skin was thick, dead and white, puffy, 

 and surrounded by an intensely red zone. The whole was 

 photographed. The temperature of small parts of the body 

 can be raised several degrees by suggestion. Nose-bleeding 

 and blood-sweat have been produced ; and in one case the 

 subject's name, traced gently on his arm with a blunt probe, 

 stood out, long after, in times of intense congestion, accom- 

 panied by a little bleeding. It is needless further to multiply 

 instances. The point is that, if intense feeling or slighter 

 degrees of feeling, morbid, long-sustained, can intimately affect 

 every bodily process in a marked and vivid manner, producing 

 great alterations of structure or function and chemico-physio- 

 logical actions, or acute and chronic disease, then those 

 slighter but much more prolonged errors and morbidities of 

 thought and feeling of which we are all guilty from moment 

 to moment and from day to day, those improper and un- 

 guarded states of consciousness which we all permit, not even 

 recognising them as improper, must be answerable, as causes, 

 for a large part of the diseases of humanity. And answerable, 

 too, not only for disease, but for the unhealthiness of what we 

 count as health, for the undergrown, short-Uved bodies in 

 which we have to dwell so carefully even when we do not 

 have what alone we call obvious disease."* 



It may be urged that one must let the mind have play in 

 some direction. That is true, but might it not be in some 

 advantageous direction — in the direction of cheerfulness, 

 hopefulness, thoughts of noble deeds, kind actions, generous 

 impulses ; not towards hate, rage, sullen broodings, lust, 

 revenge, jealousy, mean longings, balked ambitions. These 

 latter low^ planes of thought are the disease-producers ; these 

 plough the body as well as the soul, and fit the soil for the 

 germs of fatal maladies. They involve a waste of vitality, 

 and in that waste they beckon to the evil forces that lie in 

 wait for man if the " sound mind in the sound body" is not 

 ready to combat them as the leucocytes in the blood attack 

 the microbe. 



An authority — Herbert Coryn — says, " I once saw a case 

 of minor epilepsy gradually improve almost to cure by a pro- 

 longed attempt on the part of the patient to cure the irrita- 

 bility of temper to which he was a victim, and to cure the 

 discontinuity of thought and lapses of attention which he had 

 for years permitted to increase. It was an aggravated case 

 of the ordinary mind-wandering, in which we all habitually 

 indulge, and the small fits occurred during the intervals of the 

 lapsing of his attention from, and the return of his attention 



* H. Coryn, " Mind as Disease-producer." 



