In the meanwhile most physicians, lacking such knowledge and with the eye fixed largely on the body, have been pumping out the stomach, prescribing lengthy rest-cures, trying massage, diet, electricity, and surgical operations, in a vain attempt to cure a disease of the personality.  Physical measures have been given a good trial, but few would contend that they have succeeded.  Sometimes the patient has recovered—­in time—­but often, apparently, despite the treatment rather than because of it.  Sometimes, in the hands of a man like Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, results seem good, until we realize that the same measures are ineffective when tried by other men, and that, after all, what has counted most has been the personality of the physician rather than his physical treatment.

No wonder that most doctors have disliked nervous cases.  To a man trained in all the exactness of the physical sciences, the apparent lawlessness and irresponsibility of the psychic side of the personality is especially repugnant.  He is impatient of what he fails to comprehend.

=All Mind and no Body.= This unsympathetic attitude, often only half conscious on the part of the regular practitioners, has led many thousands of people to follow will-o’-the-wisp cults, which pay no attention to the findings of science, but which emphasize a realization of man’s spiritual nature.  Many of these cults, founded largely on untruth or half-falsehood, have succeeded in cases where careful science has failed.  Despite fearful blunders and execrable lack of discrimination in attempting to cure all the ills that flesh is heir to by methods that apply only to functional troubles, ignorant enthusiasts and quacks have sometimes cured nervous troubles where the conscientious medical man has had to acknowledge defeat.

=The Whole Man.= But thinking people are not willing to desert science for cults that ignore the existence of these physical bodies.  If they have found it unsatisfactory to be treated as if they were all body, they have also been unwilling to be treated as if they were all mind.  They have been in a dilemma between two half-truths, even if they have not realized the dilemma.  It has remained for modern psychotherapy to strike the balance—­to treat the whole man.  Solidly planted on the rock of the physical sciences, with its laboratories, physiological and psychological, and with a long record of investigation and treatment of pathological cases, it resembles the mind cure of earlier days or the assertions of Christian Science about as much as modern medicine resembles the old bloodletting, leeching practices of our forefathers.