2 1 8 Medicine : 



it not from neglect to employ such intelligent 

 measures that patients fall into the hands of 

 nature-curers, Christian scientists, mesmerists, and 

 the like faith-instilling persons, and are some- 

 times cured when drugs have failed ? And is it 

 not to the use of such means, albeit not 

 consciously formulated, that the popular prac- 

 titioner, whose small medical knowledge is the 

 smallest part of his skill, gains the co-operative 

 belief of his patient and owes his fashionable 

 success ? It is all very well to say that people 

 are ignorant, foolish, credulous. Of course they 

 are. The world would not have gone the way 

 it has gone were the immense majority not gladly 

 beguiled ; but if you would influence the fool for 

 his good, you must enter by sympathetic imagina- 

 tion into the fool's mind and discern the motives 

 by which it can best be moved. And it is still 

 the fact that, as Cicero said of places in his time, 

 every place swarms with fools. Sick persons, 

 even when not foolish, are notably sick in mind 

 and mostly need a mental tonic to stimulate their 

 weakened vitality ; such inspiration serving some- 

 times to animate the tissues to a strength of vital 

 resistance from which the noxious bacillus retreats 

 baffled — yes, even though it is greedy there and 

 . scents the fit soil, it does not find the fit climate. 

 Few drugs are more helpful than hope, more 

 deadly than despair. 



If the procession of Nature be an orderly 

 evolution of things up to the mental organization 



