It is difficult to estimate the exact value of suggestion in connection with other forms of treatment. There are one or two broad facts which ought to be kept in mind.
1. Suggestion is a branch of medicine, which is sometimes combined by those who practise it with other forms of treatment. Thus it is often difficult to say what proportion of the curative results is due to hypnotism and what to other remedies.
2. On the other hand, many cases of functional nervous disorder have recovered under suggestive treatment after the continued failure of other methods. Further, the diseases which are frequently cured are often those in which drugs are of little or no avail. For example, what medicine would one prescribe for a man in good physical health who had suddenly become the prey of an obsession? Such patients are rarely insane; they recognise that the idea which torments them is morbid; but yet they are powerless to get rid of it.
3. In estimating the results of suggestive treatment, it must not be forgotten that the majority of cases are extremely unfavourable ones. As the value of suggestion and its freedom from danger become more fully recognised, it will doubtless be employed in earlier stages of disease.
4. It should be clearly understood that the object of all suggestive treatment ought to be the development of the patient's will power and control of his own organism. Much disease would be prevented if we could develop and control moral states.
BUFFON
Georges Louis Leclerc, created in 1773 Comte de Buffon, was born at Montbard, in France, on September 7, 1707. Evincing a marked bent for science he became, in 1739, director of the Jardin du Roi and the King's Museum in Paris. He had long contemplated the preparation of a complete History of Nature, and now proceeded to carry out the work. The first three volumes of the "Histoire Naturelle, Générale et Particulière" appeared in 1749, and other volumes followed at frequent intervals until his death at Paris on April 16, 1788. Buffon's immense enterprise was greeted with abounding praise by most of his contemporaries. On July 1, 1752, he was elected to the French Academy in succession to Languet de Gergy, Archbishop of Sens, and, at his reception on August 25 in the following year, pronounced the oration in which occurred the memorable aphorism, "Le style est l'homme même" (The style is the very man). Buffon also anticipated Thomas Carlyle's definition of genius ("which means the transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all") by his famous axiom, "Le génie n'est autre chose qu'une grande aptitude à la patience."