“Mind-cure,” so called, has, in some shape, its legitimate sphere in the hands of men who know their profession.  It is not rare to find among nervous women a few in whom you can cause a variety of odd symptoms by pressing on a tender spine and suggesting to the woman that now she is going to feel certain pains in breast, head, or limbs.  Nervous women have, more or less, a like capacity to create or intensify pains and aches, but when a woman is assured that she only seems to have such ailments she is apt, if she be one kind of woman, to be vexed.  These dreamed pains—­I hardly know what else to call them—­are, to her, real enough.  If she be another kind of woman, if she believes you, she sets herself to disregard these aches and to escape their results by ceasing to attend to them.  You may call this mind-cure or what you will, but it succeeds.  Now and then you meet with cases in which, from sudden shock or accident, a woman is led to manufacture a whole train of disabling symptoms, and if in these instances you can convince her that she is well and can walk, eat, etc., like others, you make one of those singular cures which at times fall to the luck of mind-or faith-cures when the patient has not had the happy fortune to meet with a physician who is intelligent, sagacious as to character, and has the courage of his opinions.  I could relate many such cases if this were the place to do so, but all I desire here is to win the well woman and the nervously-sick woman to the side of the physician.  If she flies from him to seek aid from the ignorant fanatic, she may, in rare cases, get what her trained adviser ought to give her and she be willing to use, while in unskilful hands she runs sad risks of having her too morbid attention riveted to her many symptoms; for to think too much about their disorders is, on the whole, one of the worst things which can happen to man or woman, and wholesome self-attention is difficult, nay, impossible, to command without help from a personally-uninterested mind outside of oneself.

I cannot leave this subject without a further word of solemn warning.  In my youth we had mesmerism with its cures, then we had and have spiritualism with its like pretensions.  From time to time we have had faith-cures.  They come and they go, and have no stable life.  The evil they do lives after them in the many mental wrecks they leave.  When the charlatan Newton was ordering every class of the sick to get well, I was called upon to see case after case of the most calamitous results on mind and body.  Now and then he had the luck to meet some one who was merely idea-sick,—­a class of cases we know well.  Then he made a cure which would have been as easy to me as to him.  I made much inquiry, but could never find a case of organic disease with distinct tissue-changes which he had cured.  A man with hopeless rheumatic alterations of joints was made to walk a few steps without crutches.  This he did at sore cost of pain, and then came to