Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/233

Rh is to keep awake—unless the lecture is unusually exciting. Now, suggestion is most effective on persons who are in a somnolent or hypnotic condition, and your credulous rustic, staring into the fire as the snails sizzle and repeating to himself, "Here I leave my ague," is performing a very pretty psychological experiment on strictly scientific lines.

Scientific psychotherapy has undoubtedly taken this hint of reinforcing verbal suggestion with a trivial action from popular practise. The device is perhaps best known in popular medicine as applied to the cure of warts. You strike the wart downwards three times with the knot of a reed as you make your auto-suggestion, or, you rub it seven times with the third finger of the left hand in the direction in which the sun moves; or, you wet your forefinger with saliva and stroke the wart in the direction of a passing funeral; or, you touch each wart with a pebble, place the pebbles in a bag and lose them—the finder getting the warts; or, you tie as many knots in a hair as you have warts and throw the hair away; or, you steal a piece of bacon, rub the wart and slip the bacon under the bark of an ash tree, thus causing the warts to disappear from your hand and appear on the bark; or, you get another, by hook or by crook, to count your warts, when they will pass over to him.

Let it not be supposed that the foregoing remedies are merely prescriptions, but not cures. Innumerable experiments have been made with them by persons who sincerely believed in their efficacy, and the evidence of their success is as abundant as that of the success of more academic methods. The great variety of methods—and those enumerated do not begin to exhaust the list—shows that the particular differences between them 'are of no consequence, but that any device based upon the faith of the patient may be employed to utilize the control which the mind, under certain circumstances, may exercise over the so-called vegetative processes of the human system. That the most powerful suggestion may fail of its object is, of course, perfectly well-known. A case is reported of a German peasant, unpleasantly endowed with too many warts, who stood on his head in a newly made grave. To a superstitious yokel this was an extremely powerful suggestion, but the warts remained.

Any one who is of the opinion that these remedies for warts can not be effective because they are so little countenanced by scientific medical authority, will see the matter in a new light if he will take the trouble to look up the remedies that are recommended by the medical authorities themselves. A standard medical work (Foster's "Reference Handbook of the Medical Sciences") names a few of them and dismisses the rest with the remark that they are too numerous to mention, as every physician has his favorite remedy. The diversity among these remedies being as great as among the popular cures, the inference seems justified that there is nothing inherently curative in the one class any more than