could never find a case of organic disease with distinct tissue-changes
which he had cured. A man with hopeless rheumatic alterations of joints
was made to walk a few steps without crutches. This he did at sore cost
of pain, and then came to me to tell me his tale with a new set of
crutches, the healer having kept the old set as evidence of the cure.
And now we have the mind-cure, Christian science and the like,--a muddle
of mystical statements, backed by a medley of the many half-examined
facts, which show the influence of mental and moral states over certain
forms of disorder. The rarity of these makes them to be suspected.
Hardly any have the solid base of a thorough medical study, and we lose
sight of them at the moment of cure and learn nothing as to their
future.

The books on mind-cure are calculated to make much and serious evil. I
have read them with care, and have always risen from them with the sense
of confusion which one would have if desired to study a pattern from the
back of a piece of embroidery. There is, however, a class of minds which
delight in the fogs of mystery, and, when a book puzzles them, accept
this as evidence of depth of thought. I have been bewildered at times by
the positiveness and reasoning folly of the insane, and I think most
trained intelligences will feel that books like these mystical volumes
require an amount of care and thinking to avoid bewilderment of which
the mass of men and women are not possessed. In a few years they will be
the rarely read and dusty volumes, hid away in libraries, and consulted
only by those who undertake the sad task of writing the history of
credulity. Their creed will die with them, and what is best of it and
true will continue to be used by the thoughtful physician, as it has
been in all ages. But, meanwhile, it is doing much harm and little good.
Every neurologist sees already some of its consequences, and I, myself,
have over and over had to undo some of the evil it had done.