Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/232

228 Why should it be more difficult to believe that toothaches have been cured by each and every one of these methods as promptly as by the sight of a dentist's forceps? The therapeutic agent in each case is the same. It is psychical, and we call it "suggestion."

But if a toothache can be cured by psychotherapy, why not the ague? That too has often been done. Can modern psychotherapy produce a prettier illustration of the method of auto-suggestion than this—described in an old Saxon medical book? We are told that the sick man wrote the words "Febra Fuge" (fly away, fever) on a piece of paper and, beginning with the last letter, cut off a letter each day. The fever abated day by day and when the letter "F" finally fell, the ague disappeared. Fifty others, besides the narrator, were cured the same year by this method!

As the virtue of a dose of medicine does not depend upon the kind of spoon in which it is conveyed to the patient's lips so, a different way of administering suggestion for the ague proves in New England to-day of equal potency with that described by the early English.writer. The patient goes out with a friend and looks on while the friend cuts down willow rods corresponding in number to the hour of the day. Each rod must then be burnt singly and as the last one turns to ashes the distressing symptoms disappear.

Among the country people of modern England a variety of devices for circumventing the ague are known. If you peg a lock of your hair into an oak and give a sudden jerk with your head, your ague will be transferred to the oak. Or, to mention only one other, you may take nine or eleven snails, string them on a thread, saying with each slimy bead, "Here I leave my ague." Frizzle them over a fire and as the snails disappear, so will your ague.

Observe how the last method accords with modern scientific psychotherapy. The practitioners of the Emmanuel movement tell us, in "Religion and Medicine," that when giving one's self a verbal autosuggestion, it is well to accompany the words with some action, however trifling and absurd—the absurdity of the action, in fact, being rather something in its favor. For example, when you say to yourself: "I put away all worry," you might put an old shoe out of sight and think of your worry as staying with the shoe. The snail cure for ague obviously anticipates these directions. It takes advantage, moreover, in a very cunning way of another psychological discovery—the hypnotic influence of bright light when stared at fixedly. Most people now-a-days are familiar with this phenomenon from their experience in staring at strongly illuminated stereopticon screens. They know how difficult it