MIND HEALING IN GREECE
When Greece awoke to the great literary and scientific discussion of human thought that gave us such philosophic and scientific thinkers as Hippocrates, Plato and Aristotle, then psychotherapy, in the formal sense of caring for the mind of the patient as well as for his body, came to be explicitly recognized as having therapeutic value. Hippocrates insisted that medicine was an art rather than a science, that personality had much to do with it, and that the patient must be optimistically influenced in every way. The first of his aphorisms is well known, but few realize all of its significance. Hippocrates declares that "life is short and art long, the occasion fleeting, experience fallacious and judgment difficult. The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient, the attendants and externals coöperate." No one emphasized more than he the necessity for differentiating the individual patient, and to him we owe, in foundation at least, the aphorism that it is more important to know what sort of an individual has a disease than what sort of a disease the individual has, for the chances of cure greatly depend on favorable individuality.
Perhaps Hippocrates' most striking direct contribution to psychotherapy is his aphorism with regard to pain. He said: "Of two pains occurring together in different parts of the body, the stronger weakens the other." When the attention is distracted from pain, then it is lessened. Of two pains, then, only the one that attracts the most attention is much felt, and, if a slight pain is succeeded by a severe pain in another part of the body, the lesser pain will apparently become trivial, or, indeed, not be felt at all.
In Plato we find the direct philosophic expression of the value of psychotherapy. There had been during the preceding century a great increase in information with regard to the facts of physical nature, and especially the sciences relating to the human body, and so men had come, as they are prone to at such eras—our own, for instance—to think too much of the body and too little of the mind that rules it. Accordingly, we have from Plato a deliberate, emphatic assertion of this great truth under circumstances which make us realize how keenly he appreciated its significance for the art of medicine and for humanity.
Professor Osier, in his address, "Physic and Physicians as Depicted in Plato,"1 tells a story which shows clearly how much the great Greek philosopher appreciated the place of psychotherapy.
Charmides had been complaining of a headache, and Critias had asked Socrates to make believe that he could cure him of it. Socrates said that he had a charm which he had learnt, when serving with the army, of one of the physicians of the Thracian king. Zamolxis. This physician had told Socrates that the cure of a part should not be attempted without treatment of the whole, and, also, that no attempt should be made to cure the body without the soul, "and, therefore, if the head and body are to be well, you must begin by curing the mind; that is the first thing. And he who taught me the cure and the charm added a special direction. 'Let no one,' he said, 'persuade you to cure the head until he has first given you his soul to be cured. For this,' he said, 'is the great error of our day in the treatment of the human body, that physicians separate the soul from the body.'"
Because it anticipates so much that is thought to be recent in the treatment of certain affections this paragraph is interesting from many standpoints. Headache is typically one of the ills that in the modern time has often been cured by suggestion. Critias knew how much confidence Charmides had in Socrates, whom he looked upon as his master, and that, therefore, Socrates' declaration of his power to cure would probably be sufficient to relieve his disciple. Critias shrewdly suggests, however, that Socrates possessed a charm which he had learned from a distinguished royal physician. Cures in the modern time of any kind are likely to be much more effective if they come from a distance and, above all, if they have some connection with royalty, or have been tried with favorable results upon distinguished personages.
ALEXANDRIAN PSYCHOTHERAPY
When the center of interest in Greek medicine was transferred from Greece itself to Egypt, and the Alexandrian school represented what was best in medical thinking and investigation, we find evidence once more of wise physicians realizing the influence of the mind on the body and of what seemed to physicians of lesser experience the cure of physical ills by mental means. One of the most distinguished physicians of all time is Erasistratos, who, with Herophilus, made the fame of the great medical school at Alexandria, the first university medical school in the world's history. Both practiced dissection with assiduity, and, while it is Herophilus' name that is associated with the torcular within the skull, and it was he who gave the name calamus scriptorius to certain appearances in the fourth ventricle, and otherwise stamped his personality on the study of the brain, it is to Erasistratos that we have to turn for a typical example of the mental physician. Erasistratos, about 300 B. C, recognized the valves of the heart, gave them the names tricuspid and sigmoid, and, like his great colleague, studied particularly the nervous system. He seems to have distinguished the nerves of motion from those of sensation, recognized their different functions and the different directions in which they carried impulses, and thought the brain the most important organ in the body.
The story is told that he was summoned in consultation to see the son of Seleukos, surnamed Nikator, the Macedonian general of Alexander the Great, who became ruler of Babylonia. The illness of this son, Antiochos, had baffled the skill of the court physicians. While Erasistratos was feeling his patient's pulse, the stepmother of the young prince entered the room. She, the second wife of his father, was young and handsome, and Erasistratos noted that there was great perturbation of the pulse as soon as the stepmother came in. He correctly surmised that the young man was in love with the lady and that his illness had been occasioned by the feeling that his love was hopeless. The very sharing of his secret seems to have started the young man's cure, and Erasistratos' wisdom and medical skill became a proverb throughout the East.
PSYCHOTHERAPY AT ROME
Galen.—Galen, whom we are prone to think of as a Latin because so much of his work was done at Rome, but whose works have come to us in Greek, and who was a disciple of the Greek school of medicine, brought up under Greek influence in his native town of Pergamos, re-echoed Hippocrates' expressions as to the necessity for securing the patient's confidence and setting his mind at ease. The story in the "Arabian Nights" of his experience with the quack, which is known to most people, shows clearly how the place of mental influence in the relief of human ills must have been brought home to him. For nearly fifteen centuries his works continued to be the most read of medical documents. Nine tenths of all the physicians of education and influence, confidently looking to him as their master, kept copies of his works constantly near them, and turned to them for medical guidance as they would to the Bible for spiritual aid.
The book of Galen which is usually placed first among his collected works shows how much more important is the mind than the body for human happiness, and insists on mental interests as making life worth while. In it he describes the good physician, and says that to be a good physician a man must also be a good philosopher. When he comes to talk of the different sects in medicine—for even in his time there were groups of men who founded their medical practice on very different principles—he points out that the members of the different medical sects, while all employing practically the same remedies, do so on quite different principles, and yet get about the same results. This concept comes as near to being a conscious reflection as to the place that the patient's mental reaction had in therapeutics as might well be expected at that early date.
Alexander of Tralles.—After Galen, medicine suffered