Mind and Body; or, Mental States and Physical Conditions

by William Walker Atkinson

The hand by gentle stroking, will appease.’

“Many other instances might be mentioned testifying to the remarkable extent to which psycho-therapy, in one form or another, was utilized in the countries of the ancient world. This, of course, does not necessarily imply that the ancients had any real understanding of the psychological and physiological principles governing its operation. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that they used it much as do too many of the mental healers of to-day—on the basis of ‘faith cure’ pure and simple, with no attempt at diagnosis, and in a hit-or-miss fashion. It was not until the very end of the Middle Ages, so far as history informs us, that anything even remotely resembling a scientific inquiry into its nature and possibilities was undertaken, and then only in a faint, vague, indefinite way, by men who were metaphysicians and mystics rather than scientists. The first of these, Petrys Pomponatius, a sixteenth-century philosopher, sought to prove that disease was curable without drugs, by means of the ‘magnetism’ existing in certain specially gifted individuals. ‘When those who are endowed with this faculty,’ he affirmed, ‘operate by employing the force of the imagination and the will, this force affects their blood and their spirits, which produce the intended effects by means of an evaporation thrown outwards.’ Following Pomponatius, John Baptist von Helmont, to whom medical science owes a great deal, also proclaimed the curative virtue of magnetism, which he described as an invisible fluid called forth and directed by the influence of the human will. Other writers, notably Sir Kenelm Digby, laid stress on the power of the imagination as an agent in the cause as well as the cure of disease, compiling in a curious little treatise published in 1658, as interesting a collection of illustrative cases as is contained in the literature of modern psycho-therapy.”

In the Middle Ages, we read that there were many instances of miraculous cures effected at the various shrines of the saints, and in the churches in which were exhibited the bones and other relics of the holy people of church history. As Dr. George R. Patton says: “A word scrawled upon parchment, for instance, would cure fevers; an hexameter from the Iliad of Homer cured gout, while rheumatism succumbed to a verse from Lamentations. These could be multiplied, and undoubtedly all were equally potent of cure in like manner.... At one time holy wells were to be found in almost every parish of Ireland, to which wearisome journeys were made for the miraculous powers of cure. It was the custom of the cured to hang upon the bushes contiguous to the springs small fragments of their clothing, or a cane, or a crutch as a memento of cure, so that from afar the springs could be easily located by the many colored fragments of clothing, rags, canes and crutches swayed upon the branches by the wind. Inasmuch as the bushes for many rods around were thus adorned, the cures must have been far from few.”

In the Middle Ages it was the custom of persons afflicted with scrofula and kindred disorders to come before the king upon certain days to receive the “Royal Touch,” or laying-on-of-hands which was held to be an infallible specific for the disease. The custom was instituted by Edward the Confessor, and continued until the accession to power of the house of Brunswick. It is a matter of history that many persons were cured by the touch of the king’s hands. Wiseman, a celebrated surgeon and physician of old London testifies as follows: “I myself have been an eye-witness of many thousands of cures performed by his majesty’s touch alone, without any assistance of medicine or surgery, and those, many of them, such as had tired out the endeavors of able surgeons before they came hither.... I must needs profess that what I write will little more than show the weakness of our ability when compared with his majesty’s, who cureth more in one year than all the surgeons of London have done in an age.” The virtue of the “King’s Touch” was finally brought in doubt by the wonderful successes of a man by the name of Valentine Greatrakes, who in the Seventeenth Century began “laying on hands” and made even more wonderful cures than those of the king. So marked was his success that the government had difficulty in suppressing the growing conviction among the common people that Greatrakes must be of royal blood, and the rightful heir to the throne, because of the great healing virtues of his hands, which, they argued, could be possessed only by those having royal blood in their veins. The Chirurgical Society of London investigated Greatrakes’ cures, and rendered an opinion that he healed by virtue of “some mysterious sanative contagion in his body.”

But perhaps the most notable figure in the European history of Mental Healing was Franz Anton Mesmer, a native of Switzerland, who was born in 1734, and who later in the century created the greatest excitement in several European countries by his strange theories and miraculous claims. Frank Podmore in a recent work says of Mesmer: “He had no pretensions to be a thinker; he stole his philosophy ready-made from a few belated alchemists; and his entire system of healing was based on a delusion. His extraordinary success was due to the lucky accident of the times. Mesmer’s first claim to our remembrance lies in this—that he wrested the privilege of healing from the churches and gave it to mankind as a universal possession.”

Mesmer held that there was in Nature a universal magnetic force which had a powerful therapeutic effect when properly applied. He cured many people by touching them with an iron rod, through which he claimed the universal magnetism flowed from his body to that of the patient. He called this magnetic fluid “animal magnetism.” Later on he devised his celebrated “magnetic tub” or baquet, by means of which he was able to treat his patients en masse. Podmore gives the following interesting account of scenes surrounding his treatments:

“The baquet was a large oaken tub, four or five feet in diameter and a foot or more in depth, closed by a wooden cover. Inside the tub were placed bottles full of water disposed in rows radiating from the center, the necks in some of the rows pointing towards the center, in others away from it. All these bottles had been previously ‘magnetized’ by Mesmer. Sometimes there were several rows of bottles, one above the other; the machine was then said to be at high pressure. The bottles rested on layers of powdered glass and iron filings. The tub itself was filled with water. The whole machine, it will be seen, was a kind of travesty of the galvanic cell. To carry out the resemblance, the cover of the tub was pierced with holes, through which passed slender iron rods of varying lengths, which were jointed and movable, so that they could be readily applied to any part of the patient’s body. Round this battery the patients were seated in a circle, each with his iron rod. Further, a cord, attached at one end to the tub, was passed round the body of each of the sitters, so as to bind them all into a chain. Outside the first a second circle would frequently be formed, who would connect themselves together by holding hands. Mesmer, in a lilac robe, and his assistant operators—vigorous and handsome young men selected for the purpose—walked about the room, pointing their fingers or an iron rod held in their hands at the diseased parts.”

Mesmer made many wonderful cures, and attracted wide attention. In 1781 the king of France offered him a pension of thirty thousand livres if he would make public his secret. The offer was refused, but he gave private instruction and opened a school. He had many pupils and followers, prominent among whom was the Marquis de Puysegur, who made discoveries resulting in the identification of Mesmerism with the “trance condition” now commonly associated with the term, whereas originally Mesmerism included simply the healing process. Mesmer’s methods continued popular for many years after his death, until Braid’s work resulted in the founding of the modern school of Hypnotism, and Mesmerism died out.

The Abbe Faria, about 1815, after investigating Mesmerism and attracting much attention, discarded the “fluidic” theory of Mesmer, and held, instead, that in order to induce the mesmeric state and to produce the phenomena thereof, it was necessary merely to create a mental state of “expectant attention” on the part of the patient. The cause of the state and the phenomena, he held, was not in the operator but in the mind of the patient—purely subjective, in fact. Alexander Bertrand, a Frenchman, published a work about this time, holding theories similar to those of Faria. In 1841 James Braid, an English physician, becoming interested in Mesmerism, discovered that the mesmeric state might be artificially induced by staring at bright objects until the eyes became fatigued, etc., and, later, that any method whereby concentration and “expectant attention” might be induced would produce the phenomenon. He duplicated all the feats of the mesmerists, including the healing of diseases. He called his new system “Hypnotism” to distinguish it from Mesmerism, and under its new name it gained favor among the medical fraternity. Moreover, in connection with his predecessors, Faria and Bertrand, he laid the basis for the modern theories of Suggestive Therapeutics.

Shortly after Braid’s death, in 1860, Dr. A. A. Liebault, a French physician, established his since famous School of Nancy, in which during the after years the later wonderful discoveries in Suggestive Therapeutics were made. He used the methods of hypnotism, but Suggestion was ever the operative principle recognized and applied. Liebault said: “It is all a matter of Suggestion. My patients are suggested to sleep, and their ills are suggested out of them. It is very simple, once you understand the laws of Suggestion.” Dr. Charcot, in his celebrated clinic in the Salpetriere, in Paris, did great work along the same general lines, although proceeding under somewhat different theories. Following the example of these and other eminent authorities, the medical fraternity has gradually adopted many of the ideas of Suggestive Therapeutics, and to-day many of the best medical schools throughout this country and Europe give instruction in this branch of healing. Many books have been written on the subject by eminent medical authorities, and the indications are that during the present century Suggestive Therapeutics, in its various forms, will come even more prominently into popular favor, and that it will be developed far beyond its present limits. Experimental work along these lines is now being conducted in many psychological laboratories in our great universities.