to attend to them. You may call this mind-cure or what you will, but it
succeeds. Now and then you meet with cases in which, from sudden shock
or accident, a woman is led to manufacture a whole train of disabling
symptoms, and if in these instances you can convince her that she is
well and can walk, eat, etc., like others, you make one of those
singular cures which at times fall to the luck of mind-or faith-cures
when the patient has not had the happy fortune to meet with a physician
who is intelligent, sagacious as to character, and has the courage of
his opinions. I could relate many such cases if this were the place to
do so, but all I desire here is to win the well woman and the
nervously-sick woman to the side of the physician. If she flies from him
to seek aid from the ignorant fanatic, she may, in rare cases, get what
her trained adviser ought to give her and she be willing to use, while
in unskilful hands she runs sad risks of having her too morbid attention
riveted to her many symptoms; for to think too much about their
disorders is, on the whole, one of the worst things which can happen to
man or woman, and wholesome self-attention is difficult, nay,
impossible, to command without help from a personally-uninterested mind
outside of oneself.

I cannot leave this subject without a further word of solemn warning. In
my youth we had mesmerism with its cures, then we had and have
spiritualism with its like pretensions. From time to time we have had
faith-cures. They come and they go, and have no stable life. The evil
they do lives after them in the many mental wrecks they leave. When the
charlatan Newton was ordering every class of the sick to get well, I was
called upon to see case after case of the most calamitous results on
mind and body. Now and then he had the luck to meet some one who was
merely idea-sick,--a class of cases we know well. Then he made a cure
which would have been as easy to me as to him. I made much inquiry, but