162 BIOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF HUMAN PROBLEMS 



nutrition in skin muscles and joints are under 

 the influence of hypnotic suggestion; on the other 

 hand, there is no positive evidence that there is not 

 some degree of control over the trophic nerves by 

 hypnotism. These considerations make it clear that 

 it is no chimerical thought that suggestion may 

 favorably influence a variety of slight nutritional 

 disorders where these are related causally to func- 

 tional nervous disorders. That an advanced struc- 

 tural disease is modifiable through the agency of 

 suggestion of any kind is a preposterous and unten- 

 able doctrine, yet even here the skeptical medical 

 materialist is compelled to make some admissions 

 contrary to prevalent professional ideas. Two 

 examples of this influence on definite structural 

 conditions must suffice. In well-marked chronic 

 gastritis of a certain type the damaged epithelial cells 

 may be hindered from repair by the maintenance of 

 an adverse mental state of depression, and powerful 

 suggestion may so alter the nervous influences 

 excited through the vagus nerve that an important 

 obstacle to recovery is removed. Again, there are 

 cases of paralysis of a leg or arm, from a structural 

 lesion in the brain, in which hypnotic suggestion 

 strange as it may appear is followed by a better 

 use of the weak member. There is the best reason 

 to deny that this effect is due to a direct action on 

 the lesion. The explanation of the betterment lies, 

 perhaps, in better blood supply to slightly damaged 

 outlying regions of the lesion of the brain. 



