(1) That there is nothing new in the elaborate and confident pretensions now being thrust forward by a variety of ‘healers.’
(2) That, so far from scientific medicine ‘standing helpless in the presence of a new phenomenon,’ she is in possession of a very large amount of clinical material on which quite definite conclusions have been formed; and, as always, she is perfectly ready to consider and investigate any new evidence which might tend to mitigate the force of such conclusions.
Now, there are obviously two main lines of investigation. We may consider (1) the à priori reasonableness of the claim that certain bodily diseases can be cured by ‘mental’ or spiritual processes, or we may proceed to (2) an à posteriori investigation of cases of alleged cures. A third method of investigation, that which is, of course, adopted in all cases of scientific treatment of disease by new methods, viz. the tabulation of all cases treated, with the diagnosis, extent of disease, immediate and permanent results, negative as well as positive, noted in each case, is not usually possible, since no psychic or spiritual healer whom I have ever met seems to consider such tabulation at all necessary or even desirable.
In the first place, I submit a somewhat long quotation from an admirable paper[11] by one of the greatest medical authorities in the English-speaking world, Professor W. Osler.
‘An influenza-like outbreak of faith-healing seems to have the public of the American continent in its grip. It is an old story, the oldest indeed in our history, and one in which we have a strong hereditary interest, since scientific medicine took its origin in a system of faith-healing beside which all our modern attempts are feeble imitations. . . . Once or twice in each century the serpent entwining the staff of Æsculapius gets restless, contorts, and in his gambols swallows his tail, and all at once in full circle back upon us come old thoughts and old practices which for a time dominate alike doctors and laity. As a profession we took origin in the cult of Æsculapius . . . whose temples were at once magnificent shrines and hospitals. . . . Amid lovely surroundings, chosen for their salubrity, and connected with famous springs, they were the sanatoriums of the ancient world. The ritual of the cure is well known, and has been beautifully described by Pater in Marius the Epicurean. . . . The popular shrines of the Catholic Church to-day are in some ways the direct descendants of this Æsculapian cult, and the cures and votive offerings at Lourdes and Ste. Anne are in every way analogous to those of Epidaurus.’
Osler goes on to speak with much tenderness of the apparently ineradicable nature of the credulity evinced not merely by the multitude but by persons educated widely, if not well, in the matter of the healing of disease. It is indeed a portentous fact. The slightest acquaintance with the history of therapeutics, the most casual examination of the evidence of alleged cures, the faintest stirring of the reasoning faculty, as the votary asks himself whether the foremost pathologists who work continuously with the best available material in an institution devoted to the scientific study of cancer will not be more likely to arrive at a correct estimate of the probability of cure, by means other than extirpation, than a quite uninstructed masseur who has taken to ‘spiritual healing,’ these, one would suppose, would be sufficient to check the growth of credulity which we see in such evidence around us. Yet the reader will probably feel that Osler is not going beyond the warrant of easily ascertainable fact when he says:
‘We must acknowledge its potency to-day as effective among the most civilised people, the people with whom education is the most widely spread, yet who absorb with wholesale credulity delusions as childish as any that have enslaved the mind of man.’
Professor Osler’s conclusion is worth quoting:
‘Having recently had to look over a large literature on the subject of mental healing, ancient and modern, I have tried to put the matter as succinctly as possible. In all ages and in all climes the prayer of faith has saved a certain number of the sick. The essentials are, first, a strong and hopeful belief in a dominant personality, which has varied naturally in different countries and in different ages: Buddha in India and in Japan, where there are cults to match every recent vagary; Æsculapius in ancient Greece and Rome; our Saviour and a host of Saints in Christian communities; and, lastly, an ordinary doctor has served the purpose of common necessity very well. Faith is the most precious asset in our stock-in-trade. Once lost, how long does a doctor keep his clientele? Secondly, certain accessories—a shrine, a grotto, a church, a temple, a hospital, a sanatorium [Osler might have added the admirably devised entourage in such places as ‘Physical Culture’ Institutes and ‘light cure’ establishments], surroundings that will impress favourably the imagination of the patient. Thirdly, suggestion in one of its varied forms—whether the negation of disease and pain [as among the ‘Eddyites’], the simple trust in Christ of the Peculiar People, or the sweet reasonableness of the psychotherapeutist. But there must be the will-to-believe attitude of mind, the mental receptiveness—in a word, the faith which has made bread-pills famous in the history of medicine.’ We must, however, recognise the limitations of ‘mental healing.’ ‘Potent as is the influence of the mind on the body, and many as are the miracle-like cures which may be worked, all are in functional disorders, and we know only too well that nowadays the prayer of faith neither sets a broken thigh nor checks an epidemic of typhoid fever.’
The following extract is from an article in the British Medical Journal of March 13, 1909. The article begins by quoting from a paper by Dr. Allan Hamilton (U.S.A.) to the following effect: