Medicine, surgery and hygiene as at present organized largely approach personal well-being from the physical side. They have for their support a body of fact and a record of accomplishment which cannot be put out of court without sheer intellectual stultification. Modern medicine has been so massively successful in dealing with disease on the basis of a philosophy which makes everything, or nearly everything, of the body and nothing or next to nothing of the mind, that medicine was in danger of becoming more sheerly materialistic than almost any other of our sciences; Physics and Chemistry had their backgrounds in which they recognized the interplay of realities too great for their formulæ and forces too subtle for their most sensitive instruments. But medicine was almost in the way of forgetting all this when it was compelled—and that for its own good—to take account of an entirely different set of forces.
This was, to begin with, as far as the modern scientific approach is concerned, first made clearly apparent in Hypnotism. Hypnotism seems to be such a modification of normal mental conditions under the power of commanding suggestion as really for the time being to focus consciousness and mental action generally in one suggested line. A new set of inhibitions and permissions are thus imposed upon normal consciousness. Attention is withdrawn from the usual frontiers (if one may use the word) to which, consciously or subconsciously, it has always been directed and centered upon one single thing.[13]
[13] Sidis defines Hypnosis as the disassociation of the superior and inferior nerve centers. They commonly work in perfect harmony, their blended unity forming one conscious personality. "In hypnosis the two systems or nervous centers are disassociated, the superior centers and the upper consciousness are inhibited or better cut off, split off from the rest of the nervous system with its organic consciousness, which is thus laid bare, open to the influence of external stimuli or suggestions.... In hypnotic trance ... we have direct access to man's organic consciousness and through it to organic life itself."... If we broaden this last sentence to include not only organic consciousness but the deeper strata of personality in which not only individual but perhaps racial experience is bedded, we have the key to a vast range of obscure phenomena. Sidis believes that "strong permanent impressions or suggestions made on the reflex organic consciousness of the inferior centers may modify their functional disposition, induce trophic changes, and even change organic structure" and this in a sentence is probably what lies behind all faith and mental healing.—"The Psychology of Suggestion," pp. 69 and 70.
The hypnotized person becomes, therefore, unconscious of any reporting agencies outside the field of his abnormally focused attention. Normal conditions of pain or pleasure cease for the time to become real. Attention has been forced entirely out of normal channels and given a new direction. Then we discover, strangely enough, that though those messages of the afferent nerves cease to have any effect upon the subject, the imaginings of the subject carried back along outgoing lines produce the most unexpected results in physical states. If a postage stamp be placed upon the hand of the hypnotized subject and he be told that the stamp is a mustard plaster, the stamp reddens the skin and presently raises a blister. In other words, heightened and intensified expectant attention is able to produce the same results as an irritating agency.[14]
[14] Experiments by Krafft-Ebing and Forel. To be taken with caution. See Jacoby, "Suggestion and Psycho-Therapy," p. 153.
Changed Attention Affects Physical States
We are concerned here chiefly with the fact and it is a fact capable of far-reaching application. Of course the nature and extent of the changes thus produced are the battlegrounds of the two schools. Medical Science is quite willing to admit that while functional action may thus be modified no real organic changes can be produced. There is a border-land so much still in shadow that no final word can be said about the whole matter, but it is incontestably true that modifications of attention have a reflex in the modification of physical states.
A pain which is not registered does not, for the time being at least, exist, and if the attention can either through hypnotism or by a persistent mental discipline be withdrawn from disturbing physical reports, then the conditions which produce them will at least be left to correct themselves without interference from consciousness and since the whole tendency of disturbed physical organism is to correct itself, the whole process probably goes on more quickly as it certainly goes on with less discomfort if attention is withdrawn.[15] The assumption of health is a tremendous health-giving force and if the condition to be remedied is really due to a mental complex which needs only some strong exertion of the will or readjustment of attitude to change, then marvellous results may follow changed mental and spiritual states. The apparently dumb may speak, the apparently paralyzed rise from their beds, the shell-shocked pull themselves together and those under the bondage of their fears and their pains be set free. There are so many illustrations of all this that the fact itself is not in debate.
[15] Organic changes (the storm center of the controversy) may possibly be induced through a better general physical tone. Such changes would not be directly due to suggestion but to processes released by suggestion. Organic change may certainly be checked and the effect of it overcome by increased resistance. So much conservative physicians admit. How far reconstruction thus induced may go is a question for the specialist.
The Power of Faith to Change Mental Attitudes