Page:The healing art in its historic and prophetic aspects - the Harveian oration delivered before the Royal College of Physicians, Oct. 19, 1885 (IA b21908199).pdf/20

 but also in the admitted influence of the imagination over certain functions of the body. The simple and to us fairly intelligible occurrence of the occasional removal of pain by a concentration of the attention elsewhere, or by the substitution for it of some strong emotion, may account for much that, in the past no less than in the present, has become preposterous and absurd from the lengths to which it has been carried. With such material to work upon, it was and continues to be easy for designing charlatans, or mistaken zealots, to develop the most outrageous hypotheses and practices.

The revival of learning and of the scientific method, whilst lighting up the path for the few, left the masses un- touched; and the superstitions which we somewhat com- placently refer to the dark ages remained unaffected by the results that accurate observation was producing. The prac- tice of the healing art was not yet entirely removed from the hands of the priesthood; and the treatment of disease by supplications, by the laying on of hands, by the power of relics, shrines, and holy wells, found still its administrators and its dupes. The superstition of the curative virtues resi- dent in sacred things was easily extended to objects intrin- sically less reverend in their nature; and talismans of stone, metal, or wood, engraved with cabalistic signs, or phylac- teries which were texts written on scraps of parchment, and, like amulets, intended to be worn on the person-were easily acquired adjuncts to the necessarily limited supply of saintly relics. And yet who shall say that a time which has produced clairvoyance, metallic tractors, and the mind cure,' is free to cast reproach at the deeds of these dark ages?

The whole so-called cabalistic sciences of astrology and alchemy, developed as they were by men of ability like Paracelsus, came to acquire a strength which they would scarcely have possessed if left alone to the ignorance of the people. Jolin French, in a work on alchemy published