BODY AND MIND. 221 



which flood the advertising columns of our newspapers, and 

 appeal to our varied senses at well-nigh every turn of modern 

 life. A patient, suffering from some intractable complaint, in 

 which a hopelessness of cure forms no inconsiderable obstacle to 

 the physician's efforts, procures some new nostrum. The very sight 

 of the invariable string of testimonials inspires confidence. There 

 are certain to be included in the list of cures similar cases to his 

 own. He reads and believes ; and the nostrum, possibly harm- 

 less as the bread pills prescribed by the physician for the hypo- 

 chondriac, receives another tribute of grateful praise. The analo- 

 gous case of Liebig, who, when a young man, had neglected to 

 prepare for his master's visitors the nitrous oxide, or " laughing- 

 gas " of the modern dentist, but filled the inhalers with atmospheric 

 air instead, illustrates once again the power of faith. The common 

 air produced all the symptoms of mild gaseous intoxication which 

 the laughing-gas was expected to induce. Venturing within the 

 region of household medicine and popular surgery, perhaps the 

 charming away of warts presents us with another instance of the 

 literally remarkable influence of the mind in modifying not merely 

 physical states but bodily structures. Every- " wise woman " in 

 the remote districts of the country, to which the spread of educa- 

 tional sweetness and light has mostly confined such homely oracles, 

 possesses a " charm " for driving away the excrescences in question. 

 Even in the time of Lucian such female practitioners of a mild 

 species of occult art were celebrated for their successful treatment of 

 warts. Dr. Tuke gives a case in point, in which, through the effects 

 of the imagination, even in a cultured person, the growths in question 

 were made to disappear. A surgeon's daughter had about a dozen 

 warts on her hands, the usual modes of treatment having availed 

 nothing in their removal. For eighteen months, the warts remained 

 intractable, until a gentleman, noticing the disfigurement, asked her 

 to count them. Carefully and solemnly noting down their number, 

 he then said, " You will not be troubled with your warts after next 

 Sunday.'' At the time named, the warts had disappeared, and did not 

 return. Here, the connection between the imaginative impression of 

 some occult or mysterious power, and the cure, was too close to leave 

 a doubt that, as in other cases of bodily ailment, the mind, which so 

 frequently affects the body to its hurt, had in turn favourably 

 influenced the physical organisation. 



No less a personage than Lord Bacon himself had a similar cure 

 performed upon his hands by the English Ambassador's lady at Paris, 

 "who," he adds, "was a woman far from superstition." The lady's 

 procedure certainly betokened a belief in some occult effects or in- 

 fluences, for Bacon tells us that, taking a piece of lard with the skin on, 

 "she rubbed the warts all over with the fat side," and amongst the 



