and then instantly sank exhausted and expired.
The biographer of Dr. Elisha Kane says:
“I asked him for the best proved instance that he knew of the soul’s power over the body. He paused a moment upon my question, as if to feel how it was put, and answered as with a spring: ‘ The soul can lift the body out of its boots, sir! When our captain was dying —I say dying; I have seen scurvy enough to know—every old scar in his body an ulcer—I never saw a case so bad that either lived or died, men die of it, usually long before they are as ill as he was—there was trouble aboard. There might be mutiny so soon as the breath was out of his body. We might be at each others’ throats. I felt that he owed the repose of dying to the service. I went down to his bunk, and shouted in his ear, “Mutiny! Captain, mutiny! ” He shook off the cadaverous stupor. “Set me up!” said he, “and order these fellows before me!” He heard the complaint, ordered punishment, and from that hour convalesced.’”
Emperor Dom Pedro, of Brazil, lying ill in Europe, was made well by a cablegram from his daughter, acting as his regent, stating that she had signed a decree abolishing slavery in his country, fulfilling a life-long plan of the sick emperor.
Whence comes the power which enables a frail, delicate woman, invalid for years, unable to wait upon herself, with hardly strength enough to walk across the floor, to rush upstairs and to drag out sleeping children from a burning home? Whence comes the strength which enables such a delicate creature to draw out furniture and bedding from a house on fire? Certainly no new strength has been added to the muscle, no new strength to the blood, but still she does what, under ordinary conditions, would have been impossible for her. In the emergency she forgets her weakness, she sees only the emergency. The danger of her darling child, the loss of her home, stares her in the face. She believes firmly, for the time, that she can do what she attempts to do, and she does it. It is changed condition of the mind, not changed blood or muscle, that gives the needed energy. The muscle has furnished the power, but the conviction of the ability to do the thing was first necessary. The fire, the danger, the excitement, the necessity of saving life and property, the temporary forgetfulness of her supposed weakness—these were necessary to work the mind to the proper state.
Evidence of this power of mind over the body is thrust upon us in many ways. The wonder is that humanity has been so long recognizing the signs and making proper deductions and application. Like the power of electricity to leap oceans through the air, carrying human messages, it has always existed, but is only beginning to be generally realized.
The part played by the mind in the curing of disease is recognized by physicians, and whole books have been written giving instances where the mind has done more than medicine or surgery. One of the highest medical authorities, Dr. William Osier, summoned by King Edward VII. from Johns Hopkins University to be Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University, says in the Encyclopedia Americana:
“The psychical method has always played an important, though largely unrecognized, part in therapeutics. It is from faith, which buoys up the spirits, sets the blood flowing more freely and the nerves playing their part without disturbance, that a large part of all cure arises. Despondency, or lack of faith, will often sink the stoutest constitution almost to death’s door; faith will enable a spoonful of water or a bread pill to do almost miracles of healing when the best medicines have been given over in despair. The basis of the entire profession of medicine is faith in the doctor, his drugs, and his methods.”
Similarly, Dr. Smith Ely Jelliffe, of Columbia University, says, in the same encyclopedia:
“Unquestionably the oldest and yet youngest therapeutic agent is suggestion. The power to heal by faith is not the special property of any sect or class, nor the exclusive right of any system. Belief in gods and goddesses, prayer to idols of wood, of stone, of gossamer fiction, faith in the doctor, belief in ourselves engendered from within or without —these are all expressions of the great therapeutic value for healing that resides in the influence of mental states on bodily functions. These will not move mountains, they cannot cure consumption; they do not influence a broken leg, nor an organic paralysis; but suggestion, in its various forms, may be, and is, one of the strongest aids to all therapeutic measures. Of its abuse by designing hypnotists, blackmailers, clairvoyants, and a motley crew of parasites, space does not permit particularization. The human mind is credulous—it believes what it wants or wills to believe—and the use of suggestion in therapeutics is one of great power for good and for evil.”
In this statement Dr. Jelliffe is perhaps ultra-conservative, for he would certainly admit that the knitting of a broken bone is vitally affected by the state of mind of the patient, which has to do with all the functions of breathing, digestion, assimilation, aad excretion, and a sturdy resolution has, with proper conditions of climate and hygiene, aided in the recovery from the milder stages of consumption, while even the stagnation of paralysis has been stirred into life by violent shocks to the mind and nervous system.
Long ago, Sir James Y. Simpson said: “The physician knows not, and practises not the whole extent of his art, when he neglects the marvellous influence of the mind over the body.”
Churchill has given us the philosophy of health in the verse:
“The surest road to healthy say what they will,
Is never to suppose we shall be ill.
Most of those evils we poor mortals know,
From doctors and imagination flow.”
Chapter IV.
Our Worst Enemy Is Fear
Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.—Shakespeare, Measure for Measure.
THOUGHTS most deadly instrument for marring human lives is fear. Fear demoralizes character, destroys ambition, induces or causes disease, paralyzes happiness in self and others, and prevents achievement. It has not one redeeming quality. It is all evil. Physiologists now well know that it impoverishes the blood by demoralizing assimilation and cutting off nutrition. It lowers mental and physical vitality, deadens every element of success. It is fatal to the happiness of youth, and is the most terrible accompaniment of old age. Buoyancy flees before its terrifying glance, and cheerfulness cannot dwell in the same house with it.
“The most extensive of all the morbid mental conditions which reflect themselves so disastrously on the human system is the state of fear,” says Dr. William H. Holcomb. “It has many degrees or gradations, from the state of extreme alarm, fright, or terror, down to the slightest shade of apprehension of impending evil. But all along the line it is the same thing—a paralyzing impression upon the centres of life which can produce, through the agency of the nervous system, a vast variety of morbid symptoms in every tissue of the body.”
“Fear is like carbonic-acid gas pumped into one’s atmosphere,” says Horace Fletcher. “It causes mental, moral, and spiritual asphyxiation, and sometimes death—death to energy, death to tissue, and death to all growth.”
Yet from our birth we live in the presence and under the dominion of this demon, fear. The child is cautioned a thousand times a year to look out for this, and to look out for that; it may get poisoned, it may get bitten, it may get killed; something terrible may happen to it if it does not do so and so. Men and women cannot bear the sight of some harmless animal or insect because, as children, they were told it would hurt them. One of the crudest things imaginable is to impress into a child’s plastic mind the terrible image of
