Bernheim,[24] quoting the foregoing passages, follows with a story, related by Sobernheim, of a man with a paralysis of the tongue which had yielded to no form of treatment, who put himself under a certain doctor's care. The doctor wished to try an instrument of his own invention, with which he promised himself to get excellent results. Before performing the operation, he introduced a pocket thermometer into the patient's mouth. The patient imagined it to be the instrument which was to save him. In a few minutes he cried out joyfully that he could once more move his tongue freely.
"Among our cases," continues Bernheim, "facts of the same sort will be found. A young girl came into my service, having suffered from complete nervous aphonia for nearly four weeks. After making sure of the diagnosis, I told my students that nervous aphonia sometimes yielded instantly to electricity, which might act simply by its suggestive influence. I sent for the induction apparatus. Before using it I wanted to try simple suggestion by affirmation. I applied my hand over the larynx and moved it a little, and said, 'Now you can speak aloud.' In an instant I made her say 'a,' then 'b,' then 'Maria.' She continued to speak distinctly; the aphonia had disappeared.
"'The "Bibliothèque choisie de Médecine,"' says Hack Tuke, 'gives a typical example of the influence exercised by the imagination over intestinal action during sleep. The daughter of the consul at Hanover, aged eighteen, intended to use rhubarb, for which she had a particular dislike, on a following day. She dreamed that she had taken the abhorred dose. Influenced by this imaginary rhubarb, she waked up, and had five or six easy evacuations.'
"The same result is seen in a case reported by Demangeon.[25] 'A monk intended to purge himself on a certain morning. On the night previous he dreamed that he had taken the medicine, and consequently waked up to yield to nature's demands. He had eight movements.'
"But among all the moral causes which, appealing to the imagination, set the cerebral mechanism of possible causes at work, none is so efficacious as religious faith. Numbers of authentic cures have certainly been due to it.
"The Princess of Schwartzenburg had suffered for eight years from a paraplegia for which the most celebrated doctors in Germany and France had been consulted. In 1821 the Prince of Hohenlohe, who had been a priest since 1815, brought a peasant to the princess, who had convinced the young prince of the power of prayer in curing disease. The mechanical apparatus, which had been used by Dr. Heine for several months to overcome the contracture of the limbs, was removed. The prince asked the paralytic to join her faith both to his and the peasant's. 'Do you believe you are already helped?' 'Oh, yes, I believe so most sincerely!' 'Well, rise and walk.' At these words the princess rose and walked around the room several times, and tried going up and down stairs. The next day she went to church, and from this time on she had the use of her limbs."[26]
Bernheim then proceeds to give a résumé of some of the histories of cures which took place at Lourdes, where thousands flock annually to partake of the healing waters of the famous grotto. The history of that wonderful place is too well known to need repetition here. It is sufficient to say that thousands of cures have been effected there through prayer and religious faith, and the cures are as well authenticated as any fact in history or science.
The most prominent and important methods of healing the sick now in vogue may be briefly summarized as follows:
1. Prayer and religious faith, as exemplified in the cures performed at Lourdes and at other holy shrines. To this class also belong the cures effected by prayer alone, the system being properly known in this country as the Faith Cure and the Prayer Cure.
2. The Mind Cure,—"a professed method of healing which rests upon the suppositions that all diseased states of the body are due to abnormal conditions of the mind, and that the latter (and thus the former) can be cured by the direct action of the mind of the healer upon the mind of the patient."[27]
3. Christian Science.—This method of healing rests upon the assumption of the unreality of matter. This assumed as a major premise, it follows that our bodies are unreal, and, consequently, there is no such thing as disease, the latter existing only in the mind, which is the only real thing in existence.
4. Spiritism, which is a system of healing based on the supposed interposition of spirits of the dead, operating directly, or indirectly through a medium, upon the patient.
5. Mesmerism.—This includes all the systems of healing founded on the supposition that there exists in man a fluid which can be projected upon another, at the will of the operator, with the effect of healing disease by the therapeutic action of the fluid upon the diseased organism.
6. Suggestive Hypnotism.—This method of healing rests upon the law that persons in the hypnotic condition are constantly controllable by the power of suggestion, and that by this means pain is suppressed, function modified, fever calmed, secretion and excretion encouraged, etc., and thus nature, the healer, is permitted to do the work of restoration.