Health Through Will Power

by James J. Walsh

The more one studies these cases of so-called chronic rheumatism the easier it is to [{245}] understand how they become the signal "cures" which attract attention to the quacks and charlatans who promise much, but do nothing in particular, though they may give medicines or treatment of some kind or another. They only arouse the patient's will to be better and the determination to use his will with confidence, now that the much praised treatment is doing something which will surely make him better. Cases of this kind have constituted a goodly part of the clientele of the great historic impostors who succeeded in making large sums of money out of curing people by methods that in themselves had no curative power. A review of some of the chapters of that very interesting department of human history, the history of quackery, is extremely suggestive in that regard. The only way to get a good idea of the basic significance of these cases is to realize by what they were cured and by whom they were cured.

One of the most interesting illustrations of that phase of human credulity is the story of Greatrakes, the Irish adventurer who had been a soldier in Flanders, and who when his campaigns were over set up to be a healer of mankind. He chose his opportunity during [{246}] the time while Cromwell, as Lord Protector of Great Britain, had refused to continue the practice of touching the ailing which the Kings of England had pursued for hundreds of years since the Confessor's time. Cromwell did not impugn the efficacy of the Royal Touch but he refused to have anything to do with it himself. Greatrakes found it an opportune moment to announce that for three nights in succession he had been told in a dream by the Holy Spirit that in the absence of the King he was to touch people and cure them.

One might possibly think that with no better credentials than this and no testimony except his own claim in the matter Greatrakes would receive but scant attention. Any one who thinks so, however, does not understand human nature. It was not long before some of the people who had been sufferers for longer or shorter periods went to Greatrakes and allowed him to try his hand at healing them. They argued that at least if it did them no good it could do them no harm, and it was not long before some of them declared that they had been benefited by his ministrations. Very soon then he was able to furnish what seemed to be abundant evidence of Divine Mission in the cures [{247}] that were worked by his more than magic touch. Above all, people who had been sufferers for prolonged periods, who had gone the rounds of physicians, who had tried all sorts of popular remedies, and some of whom had been declared incurable were healed of their ills after a series of visits to Greatrakes. No wonder then that patients came more and more frequently, until his name went abroad in all the country and in spite of the difficulties of travel people came from long distances just to be treated by him.

All that he did was to ask the patient to expose the affected part and then Greatrakes would stroke it with his hand, assure the patient that a wonderful new vitality would go into them because of his Mission from on High and promise them that they would surely get better, explaining of course that betterment would be progressive and that it would start from this very moment. The stroking was the important part of the cure and so he is known in history as "Greatrakes the Stroker." It may be said in passing that while those who were touched by the English kings in the exercise of the prerogative of the Royal Touch were usually presented with a gold coin which had been particularly [{248}] coined for that purpose as a memorial, a corresponding gold piece, a sovereign as a rule, in Greatrakes' method of treatment passed from the patient to the healer. It was a case of metallotherapy with extraction of the precious metal from the patient, as is always the case under such circumstances.

Here in America we had a similar experience, though ours had science as the basis of the superstition in the case instead of religion. The interest aroused by Galvani's experience with the twitching of frogs' legs when exposed nerve and muscle were touched by different metals led Doctor Elisha Perkins to invent a pair of tractors which would presumedly apply Galvani's discovery to therapeutics. These were just plain pieces of metal four or five inches long, shaped more or less like a lead pencil and tapering to a blunt point. With these, as Thatcher, one of our earlier historians of medicine, tells us, Perkins succeeded in curing all sorts of ailments, but particularly many different kinds of painful conditions. He was most successful in the treatment of "pains in the head, face, teeth, breast, side, stomach, back, rheumatism and so forth." In a word, he cured the neuralgias and the rheumatic pains and the chronic [{249}] rheumatisms which are the source of so much trouble—and especially complaint—for the old, and which so often physicians, in any time of the world's history, have been unable to cure.

For a time his success was supposed to be due to some curious electrical power that he was using. Learned pamphlets were issued to show that animal magnetism or animal electricity or Galvanism was at work. Professors at no less than three universities in America gave attestations in favor of its efficacy. Time has of course shown that there was absolutely no physical influence of any kind at work. The only appeal was to the mind. Elisha Perkins was a Yale man of education and impressive personality, "possessing by nature uncommon endowments both bodily and mental ", and he succeeded in impressing on his patients the idea that they would surely be cured; he thus overcame the dreads, released the will power, gave new hope and a tonic stimulus to appetite, created a desire for exercise, and then the will kept this up and before long the patient was cured.

When animal magnetism, as it was called about the middle of the nineteenth century, [{250}] was practised without apparatus, one of its most important claims to the consideration of physicians was founded on its power to heal chronic painful affections which had previously resisted all therapeutic efforts. The power of neuro-hypnotism, as it came to be designated, to accomplish this, will be best appreciated from the fact that this state was being used as a mode of anaesthesia for surgical operations. When the news of the use of ether to produce narcosis for surgical purposes at the Massachusetts General Hospital first came to England, it did not attract so much attention as would otherwise have been the case, because English physicians and surgeons were just then preoccupied with the discussion of neuro-hypnotic anaesthesia, and those who believed in it thought that ether would not be necessary, while those who refused to believe thought the report with regard to ether just another of these curious self-delusions to which physicians seemed to be so liable.

Perkins' declarations of the curative value of his tractors were, after all, only a succeeding phase of what Mesmer had called to the attention of the medical profession and the public in Paris not quite a generation before. Mesmer seated his patients around a tub [{251}] containing bottles filled with metallic materials out of which wires were conducted and placed in the hands of patients seated in a circle around it. Mesmer called this apparatus a baquet or battery and it was thought to have some wonderful electric properties. A great many people who received the treatment were cured of chronic pains and aches that had sometimes lasted for years. So many prominent people were involved that the Government finally ordered an investigation to be made by French scientists with whom, because he was the Minister from the colonies at the time, our own Benjamin Franklin was associated. They declared that there was not a trace of electricity or any other physical force in Mesmer's apparatus. He was forbidden to continue the treatment and there was a great scandal about the affair, because a large number of people felt that he was doing a great deal of good.

When hypnotism came in vogue again at the end of the nineteenth century, it was a case of chronic rheumatism that gave it its first impetus in scientific circles. Professor Bernheim of Nancy had tried in vain all of his remedies in the treatment of a patient suffering from lumbago. The patient disappeared [{252}] for a time and when Bernheim next saw him, he was cured. Bernheim had treated him futilely for months and was curious to know how he had been cured. The patient told him that he had been cured by hypnotism as practised by Liebault. This brought Bernheim to investigate Liebault's method of hypnotism and made him a convert to its practice. It was the interest of the school of Nancy in the subject that finally aroused Charcot's attention and gave us the phase of interest in hypnotism which attracted so much public attention some thirty years ago. Many other cases of those very refractory affections—lumbago and sciatica—have been cured by hypnotism when they have resisted the best directed treatment of other kinds over very long periods.

It is these chronic rheumatisms, so called, the chronic pains and aches in muscles in the neighborhood of joints, that were cured by the Viennese astronomer, Father Maximilian Höll, in the eighteenth century. He simply applied the magnet and saw the result, and felt sure that there must be some physical effect, though there was none. His work was taken up by Pfarrer Gassner of Elwangen who, after using the magnets for a time, found [{253}] that there was no need of their application, provided the patients could by prayer and other religious means be brought into a state of mind where they were sure that they were going to get better. They then proceeded to use their muscles properly in spite of the pain that might result for a time, and as a result it was not long before they were cured of their affections. The Church forbade his further practise because of his expressed idea that pain came from the power of evil and dropped from men when they turned to God, which was the eighteenth-century anticipation of Eddyism. Dowie's cures were largely of similar affections, and patients sometimes dropped their crutches and walked straight who could not walk before.