THEODORE TRONCHIN 1 83 



purpose was already to strengthen the frame, increase the powers of 

 resistance, and by hygienic living to avoid rather than to treat diseases. 

 "With sobriety and exercise one will have little need of physicians or 

 druggists," he says to one patient. Yet he was well aware of the need 

 of directing natural processes, checking or stimulating by medical means 

 as the case might require. He was trained in the pathology of his day, 

 and recognized as one of the best pharmacologists of his time. 



If in reading his letters of medical advice upon health and physical 

 hygiene, it is difficult to realize that they were written one hundred and 

 fifty years ago, so fitting are they today; there is something even more 

 startling in its similarity to present-day fashions in medicine, in the 

 attitude he took toward the mental and morai factors of disease. A 

 firm believer in the close union of body and spirit, he appreciated at 

 their proper values the mental ailments due to visceral disease, and the 

 bodily disturbances and discomforts whose origin lay far back in mental 

 or moral torpor. Wonderfully sympathetic toward all who became 

 his patients, his psychical management of the fashionable women who 

 suffered from "the vapors" as they were then called, would be a helpful 

 lesson to many present-day excited psycho-therapeutists. For he never 

 confused the relationship between bodily and mental causes or effects. 

 Witness two letters. First to the baron d'Aigunes: 



The exhaustion of the strength of a spirit united so closely to the body affects the 

 health of the body. The mind may be too active for the body, and if the body is frail it is 

 only the sooner worn out. The physician is then called in, who often completes what the 

 spirit's exertions have begun. He purges, pukes, and bleeds. The body is thereby only 

 used up the sooner; because seeing only the suffering body he does not think that per- 

 haps the root of the trouble may be in the spirit, where as a fact it is. Epictetus and Marcus 

 Aurelius ought to be his Hippocrates and Galen — the thoughts of Seneca his materia medica. 

 If he knew how to make use of these, he would often cure ills which appear to him incurable, 

 or which are so without seeming so to him. Not that a body worn out by its spirit ought 

 to have any special treatment different from that of the spirit; but always in such cases 

 it is the mind which comes first .... Then rest the worn-out body, which recuperates 

 much better by exercise and simple living than by any other remedies. 



On the other hand to M. d'Angent: 



Your letter, my good friend, had not a word too much. Not one less would have 

 served to put me fully in touch with the conflict between the moral and physical jurisdictions 

 which you have very well painted. In reviewing carefully all that has happened to you, 

 you can at present know as well as I do, that a small derangement in the organ designed 



