RELATIONS TO OTHER SCIENCES 255 



I do not know that the question really deserves very serious 

 consideration. A little acquaintance with dispensary and hospital 

 practice and the records of the health boards is sufficient to show 

 that mental states rank far below the infections, poisons, inflamma- 

 tions, or injuries as makers of symptoms among all classes. I think 

 it would be safe to say that the general practitioner meets a real 

 objective disease twenty times to one in which the symptoms are 

 due to the attitude of the mind. The mind disturbs functions and 

 creates symptoms, but it muddles rather than makes disease. To be 

 sure, it is indirectly a potent thing. Thus, in conditions of profound 

 depression there is a lessened vital and circulatory resistance, and 

 infection can creep in. It would never do for physicians to fight an 

 epidemic with cold hands. Conditions of the mind can favor or 

 delay digestion and peristalis, and there is, indeed, no function 

 more susceptible to physical control than the chylopoietic tract. One 

 can almost stop digestion by taking thought of it, and the influ- 

 ence of mental treatment and sugar pellets upon constipation can 

 be given objective proof in many instances. The mind has, in fact, 

 quite a lively though incomplete and temporary control over the 

 different functions of the body, and it can, after years, do some 

 damage to them. It can check and change secretions, indirectly 

 thicken arteries, cripple functional activity, and hurry on old age. 

 But after all, the mass of people are sick with tuberculosis, rheum- 

 atism, bronchial and heart diseases, and the infections and the injuries 

 of life. 



As the mind can help on disease, so it can help on its cure; but 

 a healthy person cannot by an act of his mind make himself crazy; 

 and neither can he by any mental influence, if crazy, make himself 

 well. It has been proved beyond any question that persons who 

 have severe and profound degenerative traits cannot be cured by 

 psychic suggestions. 



Hypnotism, for example, is powerless against the insanities after 

 they have developed, it is powerless even against the minor psycho- 

 ses that are long established and of severe type, such, for example, 

 as chronic hysteria, the long-established obsessions, vicious mental 

 habits, and severe degeneracy. What is true of hypnotism is true of 

 all forms of mental therapeutics, and all types of charlatanry that 

 appeal to the imagination. It may be noticed that the quack and the 

 exploiter of marvelous cures never starts a psychopathic hospital 

 or offers to work in an insane asylum. When the mind is a little 

 enfeebled, over-sensitive, or untrained, 'it is easily worked upon by 

 emotional influences and suggestions; when it is sound, and trained 

 by education and experience, and when it is seriously disordered, it 

 is not affected by these agencies. Psychic measures of treatment, 

 on the whole, find their legitimate field in internal medicine, among 



