220 STUDIES IN LIFE AND SENSE. 



however, it is found that the influence of the mind, and the vain 

 imaginings of a morbid fancy, may induce disease, it is no less 

 certain that a like action of the mind may occasionally cure an other- 

 wise stubborn malady. No better illustrations of such cases can be 

 cited than those in which a severe fright relieves a condition which 

 may have resisted every effort of treatment. An attack of tooth- 

 ache not unfrequently disappears when we seat ourselves in the 

 dentist's chair. A severe attack of the gout has been cured by the 

 alarm raised consequent upon the house of the patient being set on 

 fire ; whilst more than one case of severe pain has been cured by the 

 patient ignorantly swallowing the paper on which the surgeon's pre- 

 scription was written instead of the prescription itself. 



There can be little doubt that certain phases of the imagination 

 possess a singular and at the same time valuable effect in inducing 

 the removal of diseased conditions. It is not certainly a satisfactory 

 use, when viewed from the moral side, of such knowledge, when we 

 find that a vast number of the cures said to have been effected by 

 the nostrums of quacks, are wrought in virtue of this influence of 

 mind over body." The "faith-healing" Bethshans, and allied 

 establishments for the cure of all diseases, grave or simple, by faith 

 in the power of prayer, present in the light of this remark a study of 

 physiological interest. Says Dr. Tuke, in the preface to his interest- 

 ing and classical work on the " Influence of the Mind upon the Body," 

 the medical reader should " copy nature in those interesting instances, 

 occasionally occurring, of sudden recovery from the spontaneous 

 action of some powerful moral cause, by employing the same force 

 designedly, instead of leaving it to mere chance. The force is there," 

 continues this author, "acting irregularly and capriciously. The 

 question is whether it cannot be applied and guided with skill and 

 wisdom by the physician. Again and again we exclaim, when some 

 new nostrum, powerless in itself, effects a cure, ' It's only the 

 imagination ! ' We attribute to this remarkable mental influence a 

 power which ordinary medicines have failed to exert, and yet are 

 content with a shrug of the shoulders to dismiss the circumstance 

 from our minds without further thought. I want medical men who 

 are in active practice to utilise this force to yoke it to the car of 

 the Son of Apollo, and, rescuing it from the eccentric orbits of 

 quackery, force it to tread, with measured step, the orderly paths of 

 legitimate medicine. 'Remember,' said Dr. Rush, in addressing 

 medical students, * how many of our most useful remedies have been 

 discovered by quacks. . . . Medicine has its Pharisees as well as 

 religion ; but the spirit of this sect is as unfriendly to the advance- 

 ment of medicine as it is to Christian charity.'" 



These words are full of practical wisdom and sound common 

 sense, and serve to explain the modus operandi of the nostrums 



