Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/71

Rh the mind works is closely connected with every other organ of the body and so influences digestion, circulation and all other functions. Likewise the mind is affected by the bodily states. The ill working of damaged organs may produce a mental state of pain or depression. These feelings may be heightened or diminished by mental effort, or may be more or less forgotten, for the time at least, by directing consciousness into some other channel of activity. Disease is, in every case, modified more or less by the mind, and the mental state may sometimes help to determine the success or failure of bodily fight against destructive agencies. If appeal to the mind seems to cure the bodily ill, it does not indicate that the patient would not have recovered anyhow, and does not signify that the mind itself effected the return to health. No amount of faith or other mental state can take the place of insufficient body-resources—can restore a damaged lung or a missing limb.

Disease being thus the attempt of the body to restore itself to its usual condition by ridding itself of destructive agents, the treatment of disease must be directed toward helping the body to this end, by putting the mental and muscular forces at rest, by proper nourishment and by such antitoxins or drugs as aid it in its natural efforts to rid itself of harmful conditions. Better still are the efforts toward prevention of infectious and other injuries by the avoidance of intemperance in eating and drinking, by breathing fresh air, by cleanliness, and by such other means as the body demands to keep it at its best working power. Lastly, the mind should be trained not to meddle too much with bodily affairs, save as it observes the laws of hygiene, and it should be educated to deal readily with the trials and vexations of life in a way that will not affect the general health through depressing emotional discharges.

It will be seen that our modern faith healers make no difference between diseases as regards their cause. In their ignorance, comparable only to that of the primitive medicine man, they deal with all sickness alike. While the condition of the mind has much to do with some diseases, with others it has little or no part in the cure, and the body itself must work out its salvation through that wise inner body-directing intelligence which the higher mind can not know nor—but to a slight extent—influence. The faith curist in the conceit of his ignorance takes the credit for the cures which, through good fortune plus a grain of mental stimulus, often come to pass under his administrations, while he who has studied into the physical nature of disease is perfectly aware that when his patient recovers he has only assisted nature more or less in what she would probably have accomplished without his help though usually not so easily and completely and sometimes not at all. It is this humble knowledge of the limitations of his art that makes the