In short, a careful review of all the facts available to date leads us decidedly to the conclusion that the nervous system is the toughest and most resisting tissue of the body, and that its highest function, the mind, has the greatest stability of any of our bodily powers. Only one man in six dies of disease of the nervous system, as contrasted with nearly one in three from diseases of the lungs; and only one individual in four hundred becomes insane, as contrasted with from three to ten times that number whose digestive systems, whose locomotor apparatus, whose heart and blood-vessels become hopelessly deranged without actually killing them.
CHAPTER XIX
MENTAL INFLUENCE IN DISEASE, OR HOW THE MIND AFFECTS THE BODY
One of the dearest delusions of man through all the ages has been that his body is under the control of his mind. Even if he didn't quite believe it in his heart of hearts, he has always wanted to. The reason is obvious. The one thing that he felt absolutely sure he could control was his own mind. If he couldn't control that, what could he control? Ergo, if man could control his mind and his mind could control his body, man is master of his fate. Unfortunately, almost in proportion as he becomes confident of one link in the chain he becomes doubtful of the other. Nowadays he has quite as many qualms of uncertainty as to whether he can control his mind as about the power of his mind over his body. By a strange paradox we are discovering that our most genuine and lasting control over our minds is to be obtained by modifying the conditions of our bodies, while the field in which we modify bodily conditions by mental influence is steadily shrinking.
For centuries we punished the sick in mind, the insane, loading them with chains, shutting them up in prison-cells, starving, yes, even flogging them. We exorcised their demons, we prayed over them, we argued with them,—without the record of a single cure. Now we treat their sick and ailing bodies just as we would any other class of chronic patients, with rest, comfortable surroundings, good food, baths, and fresh air, correction of bad habits, gentleness, and kindness, leaving their minds and souls practically without treatment, excepting in so far as ordinary, decent humanity and consideration may be regarded as mental remedies,—and we cure from thirty to fifty per cent, and make all but five per cent comfortable, contented, comparatively happy.
We are still treating the inebriate, the habitual drunkard, as a minor criminal, by mental and moral means—with what hopeful results let the disgraceful records of our police courts testify. We are now treating truancy by the removal of adenoids and the fitting of glasses; juvenile crime by the establishment of playgrounds; poverty and pauperism by good food, living wages, and decent surroundings; and all for the first time with success.
In short, not only have all our substantial and permanent victories over bodily ills been won by physical means, but a large majority of our successes in mental and moral diseases as well. Yet the obsession persists, and we long to extend the realm of mental treatment in bodily disease.
That the mind does exert an influence over the body, and a powerful one, in both health and disease, is obvious. But what we are apt to forget is that the whole history of the progress of medicine has been a record of diminishing resort to this power as a means of cure. The measure of our success and of our control over disease has been, and is yet, in exact proportion to the extent to which we can relegate this resource to the background and avoid resorting to it. Instead of mental influence being the newest method of treatment it is the oldest. Two-thirds of the methods of the shaman, the witch-doctor, the medicine-man, were psychic. Instead of being an untried remedy, it is the most thoroughly tested, most universal, most ubiquitous remedy listed anywhere upon the pages of history, and, it may be frankly stated, in civilized countries, as widely discredited as tested. The proportion to which it survives in the medicine of any race is the measure of that race's barbarism and backwardness. To-day two of the most significant criteria of the measure of enlightenment and of control over disease of either the medical profession of a nation or of an individual physician are the extent to which they resort to and rely upon mental influence and opium. Psychotherapy and narcotics are, and ever have been, the sheet-anchors of the charlatan and the miracle-worker.
The attitude of the medical profession toward mental influence in the treatment of disease is neither friendly nor hostile. It simply regards it as it would any other remedial agency, a given drug, for instance, a bath, or a form of electricity or light. It is opposed to it, if at all, only in so far as it has tested it and found it inferior to other remedies. Its distrust of it, so far as this exists, is simply the feeling that it has toward half a hundred ancient drugs and remedial agencies which it has dropped from its list of working remedies as obsolete, many of which still survive in household and folk medicine. My purpose is neither to champion it nor to discredit it, and least of all to antagonize or throw doubt upon any of the systems of philosophy or of religion with which it has been frequently associated, but merely to attempt to present a brief outline of its advantages, its character, and its limitations, exactly as one might of, say, calomel, quinine, or belladonna.