CHAPTER XI
THE HEALERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
"Medical cannot be separated from moral science, without reciprocal and essential mutilation."—Reid.
"Man is a dupeable animal. Quacks in medicine, quacks in religion, and quacks in politics know this, and act upon that knowledge. There is scarcely anyone who may not, like a trout, be taken by tickling."—Southey.
"Canst thou minister to a mind diseas'd, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain, And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart?"—Shakespeare.
"Joy, temperance, and repose, Slam the door on the doctor's nose."—Longfellow.
There seems to have been a great development of mental healing during the nineteenth century. The healing by shrines, relics, and charms diminished in the latter part of the century on account of the lessening of superstition and the better understanding of mental laws, but additional work has thereby been laid upon the healers. The development of hypnotism and the exposition of the laws underlying it, the collection and publication of cases of cures by mental means, the lessening of faith in noxious doses of drugs, the increase of nervous diseases which are most easily helped by suggestive therapeutics, the attempted duplication of apostolic gifts on the part of some sects and the general reaction against the materialism of the early part of the century as shown in the great revival of psychical study and research have all been factors in the demand for mental medicine.
The healers have been of various kinds. Having already dealt with the mesmerizers and hypnotizers, we shall now look only at the classes of independent and generally less scientific investigators and experimenters. Some have not been regular healers but healed only incidentally, as, e. g., the revivalists; some have followed James 5:14 f. in anointing with oil and praying—of these and others, some have had institutions for housing the patients; some have been peripatetic healers; some have simply used prayer; some have established their systems on metaphysical bases and been the founders of sects; some have combined the results of scientific investigations in an endeavor to help mankind. Many of these have simply followed the ways of their predecessors of former centuries, but a few started on new lines of procedure. Whatever the method, they have all, consciously or unconsciously, depended upon the influence of the patient's mind over his own body, and the now better understood laws of suggestion.