‘In all this agitation, it would almost seem as if the intelligent physician had never made use of psychotherapy, but that he was a mechanical giver of drugs and took little or no interest in his patients. If the new critics of the medical profession, who have been so active of late, would take the trouble to investigate, they would often find, among the great and successful men of all times and of to-day, that the human side is very strongly developed, and that their patients are studied from every point of view, and treated accordingly.’
‘We would add,’ says the writer of the article in the British Medical Journal, ‘that the intelligent application of the physician’s knowledge of the influence of the body on the mind is the one condition of success in the difficult art of dealing with patients and reinforcing the curative power of Nature or, what comes to the same thing, enabling sufferers to work out their own deliverance from the thraldom of functional disease. All really great physicians have used this force, sometimes, it may be, unconsciously, but often with deliberate intent. It is the power of influencing the mind of the patient or, in other words, of exciting confidence in his gift of healing, that makes what is called “personal magnetism.” ’
At this point I may be permitted to offer one or two observations.
(1) To speak quite strictly, it is not a question of ‘à priori’ possibility or impossibility. As Huxley pointed out, twenty years ago, few things can be said to be impossible except mathematical misstatements or manifest contradictions. Thus 2 + 2 cannot possibly yield any result but 4. A square circle, a raised depression, are, in the strictest sense of the term, impossibilities. But, with regard to an enormous number of alleged phenomena popularly styled impossible, what is really meant is either that they are not impossible at all, but only in some high degree improbable, or that we have not sufficient knowledge to enable us to say whether or not they are impossible. In any case, before accepting them, we are bound as honest men to demand evidence which may be thoroughly sifted. The sort of stuff which we usually get, when we ask for such evidence, will be instanced at a later stage.
(2) Again, to speak quite strictly, I do not know that anyone would care to draw a hard-and-fast line between what is ‘functional’ and what is ‘organic.’ These terms are extremely convenient, but we must remember that they are only terms. There is an oft-recurring danger, against which we all require to be continually on our guard, of falling into the old error of the realists. ‘Animate and inanimate’ (assuming that the recent claim to have demonstrated in metals a process of reproduction analogous to those observed in protoplasm is endorsed, as seems probable), ‘genus and species,’ ‘animal and vegetable,’ these and many others are eminently useful classifications, and the border line between each and its opposite varies from comparative precision to extreme vagueness. But in no case are they absolutely precise in the sense in which the distinction between an integer and a vulgar fraction is precise. And in the matter of the terms ‘functional’ and ‘organic’ we must walk very warily indeed. Is epilepsy a functional neurosis or an organic disease? Analogy suggests organic changes. No such changes have been constantly demonstrated by post mortem evidence; partly, of course, because post mortem examinations of cases of death in the epileptic or epileptiform condition have been extremely rare, and are not very common in cases where there is a well-authenticated history of attacks; but partly because our investigations into the minute anatomy of many morbid conditions are at present barred by the limitations of microscopic vision. We have no right whatever to assert dogmatically that there is no organic change in a tissue because we cannot see it under a magnification of 1000 diameters—though for a variety of reasons, which all pathologists will recognise, it is not altogether probable that a magnification of 10,000 diameters would in such cases demonstrate a constant change. In any case, if we are told by a spiritual or psychic healer that he cures cases of, let us say, old-standing chronic nephritis or cirrhosis of the liver by his own peculiar methods, our reply must be, not that this is impossible because we are dealing with organic disease, but rather that—
(1) If he claims to act mentally or spiritually on the higher centres of the brain and so to reach the diseased tissues, a cure is in the highest degree unlikely, for a reason which will be given at a later stage;
(2) If his method is avowedly quite empirical, and he only professes to exercise a power which he does not even dimly understand, we must respectfully ask for evidence, which can be examined and tested to the satisfaction of a competent and impartial mind.
Now, as to the influence of ‘suggestion,’ whether or not accompanied by other methods, e.g. hypnotism, magnetism, electricity, &c., on (so-called) functional conditions, modern medical science speaks with no uncertain voice.
At a meeting of the Harveian Society held last October, much interesting information was produced.
A paper of great and permanent value was read by Dr. Claye Shaw on the ‘Influence of Mind as a therapeutic agent.’ It is impossible in the space at my disposal to quote more than two brief extracts from his paper. He thus defines ‘suggestion’: