Soul forces are the most important.  The spirit builds the body.  Strength springs from joy.  Efficiency is achieved despite care, fear, and uncertainty—­We speak here of thymogenetic automatism or the automatism of harmony ("thymogenetische automatismus oder stimmungsautomatismus").  The autonomous nervous system achieves, under the influence of joy, the expansion of the blood vessels in skin and muscle....  The muscular activity incited by joy means the use of calories and stimulation of appetite.  Muscular contraction pulls and draws at the bones, ligaments are tensed, breathing deepend, appetite increased ...  A child influenced by the daily exercise of joy develops physically strong and powerful. ...  The Soul care (Seele Sorge) of the practical doctor is his most significant daily task alongside of prescriptions and manipulative dexterity.

Soul-care in the medical sense is a concern for the wishes, hopes and fears of the patient, the considered participation in his fate.  Such a relationship leads to the all-important and generally recognized trust in the doctor.  This faith, in all cases, leads to the improvement, often even to the elimination of symptoms, of the disease.  Here we have clearly before us the great significance of thymogenetic automatism.

Academic physicians should not dismiss this because we do not know its biochemical aspects. (We must beware of regarding something as unacceptable because it is not measurable in exact terms, he warns.) We see its practical results, and, therefore, thymogenetic automatism must stand in the first rank as of overwhelming significance.  Thus, also, the principle, strength through joy (Kraft durch Freude) stands firmly as an inescapable natural law.

We see the practical country doctor spreading courage and confidence.  For years too few doctors have seen clearly that gymnastic tourism and sport do more for health than all doctors taken together.  And now we face the fact that a single man, a non-medical man (Hitler) through his great qualities, has opened up new avenues of health for the eighty million folk of Germany.

In the majority of cases things so happen that the doctor must act before making a diagnosis, since only the mis-educated patients, the one-sided intellectual patient, wishes in the very first place to know the diagnosis.  But the unspoilt and properly ordered type of person wishes only to be relieved of his pain.  For him the diagnosis is an interesting side issue but not the principle thing.  We can thus also understand why we always meet the desire for a diagnosis placed first by the over-intellectualized Jewish patient.  But that is not the case with most Aryan patients.  They, from the first, come to meet the doctor with more trust.  They do not entertain as many after-thoughts.  And I cannot help but remark that after-thoughts are hardly conducive to right results.

(After a discussion of the sterilization of the unfit and of inheritable diseases he turns to the subject of child bearing.)