Page:Science and Health.djvu/368

364 one instance, but in every case. The shocking theory that man is governed all his days, and killed at last by his body, is too absurd to last another century. Our press sends forth, unwittingly, many a plague spot on the human family, in treatises on disease, hygiene, and therapeutics; giving names for maladies and long explanations regarding them, affects people like a Parisian name for a new dress; every one that can, will have it. A minutely-described, long-syllabled name for disease has cost a man all his earthly days of usefulness. What a price for knowledge! but not exceeding its original market value, when God said, “In the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt die.” A doctor's belief in disease harms his patients more than calomel, morphine, ether, or the forceps; mind is more potent than matter. A patient hears the doctor's verdict like a culprit his death-sentence. He may seem calm under it, and to exercise fortitude worthy a better cause, or an occasion more real, but he is not calm; fear is mastering the case and developing the disease. The mind's power to harm the body, reversed in action, would heal it, and the sick would triumph over the disease they resign themselves to suffer on the ground of inevitableness. If mind can kill, as has been proved, it has power to cure also. Ah! patient, or impatient sufferer, may your eyes be opened to behold your way of escape from sickness; to this end we have pledged our endeavors, and labored since God raised us up from hopeless disease and unspeakable sufferings. The doctor is the artist that delineates in mind most distinctly the image of disease, and causes belief to fill up his outlines on the body. Possibly disease had appeared before