Whence comes the power which enables a frail, delicate woman, invalid for years, unable to wait upon herself, with hardly strength enough to walk across the floor, to rush upstairs and to drag out sleeping children from a burning home? Whence comes the strength which enables such a delicate creature to draw out furniture and bedding from a house on fire? Certainly no new strength has been added to the muscle, no new strength to the blood, but still she does what, under ordinary conditions, would have been impossible for her. In the emergency she forgets her weakness, she sees only the emergency. The danger of her darling child, the loss of her home, stares her in the face. She believes firmly, for the time, that she can do what she attempts to do, and she does it. It is changed condition of the mind, not changed blood or muscle, that gives the needed energy. The muscle has furnished the power, but the conviction of the ability to do the thing was first necessary. The fire, the danger, the excitement, the necessity of saving life and property, the temporary forgetfulness of her supposed weakness—these were necessary to work the mind to the proper state.
Evidence of this power of mind over the body is thrust upon us in many ways. The wonder is that humanity has been so long recognizing the signs and making proper deductions and application. Like the power of electricity to leap oceans through the air, carrying human messages, it has always existed, but is only beginning to be generally realized.
The part played by the mind in the curing of disease is recognized by physicians, and whole books have been written giving instances where the mind has done more than medicine or surgery. One of the highest medical authorities, Dr. William Osier, summoned by King Edward VII. from Johns Hopkins University to be Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University, says in the Encyclopedia Americana:
“The psychical method has always played an important, though largely unrecognized, part in therapeutics. It is from faith, which buoys up the spirits, sets the blood flowing more freely and the nerves playing their part without disturbance, that a large part of all cure arises. Despondency, or lack of faith, will often sink the stoutest constitution almost to death’s door; faith will enable a spoonful of water or a bread pill to do almost miracles of healing when the best medicines have been given over in despair. The basis of the entire profession of medicine is faith in the doctor, his drugs, and his methods.”
Similarly, Dr. Smith Ely Jelliffe, of Columbia University, says, in the same encyclopedia:
“Unquestionably the oldest and yet youngest therapeutic agent is suggestion. The power to heal by faith is not the special property of any sect or class, nor the exclusive right of any system. Belief in gods and goddesses, prayer to idols of wood, of stone, of gossamer fiction, faith in the doctor, belief in ourselves engendered from within or without —these are all expressions of the great therapeutic value for healing that resides in the influence of mental states on bodily functions. These will not move mountains, they cannot cure consumption; they do not influence a broken leg, nor an organic paralysis; but suggestion, in its various forms, may be, and is, one of the strongest aids to all therapeutic measures. Of its abuse by designing hypnotists, blackmailers, clairvoyants, and a motley crew of parasites, space does not permit particularization. The human mind is credulous—it believes what it wants or wills to believe—and the use of suggestion in therapeutics is one of great power for good and for evil.”
In this statement Dr. Jelliffe is perhaps ultra-conservative, for he would certainly admit that the knitting of a broken bone is vitally affected by the state of mind of the patient, which has to do with all the functions of breathing, digestion, assimilation, aad excretion, and a sturdy resolution has, with proper conditions of climate and hygiene, aided in the recovery from the milder stages of consumption, while even the stagnation of paralysis has been stirred into life by violent shocks to the mind and nervous system.
Long ago, Sir James Y. Simpson said: “The physician knows not, and practises not the whole extent of his art, when he neglects the marvellous influence of the mind over the body.”
Churchill has given us the philosophy of health in the verse:
“The surest road to healthy say what they will,
Is never to suppose we shall be ill.
Most of those evils we poor mortals know,
From doctors and imagination flow.”
Chapter IV.
Our Worst Enemy Is Fear
Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.—Shakespeare, Measure for Measure.
THOUGHTS most deadly instrument for marring human lives is fear. Fear demoralizes character, destroys ambition, induces or causes disease, paralyzes happiness in self and others, and prevents achievement. It has not one redeeming quality. It is all evil. Physiologists now well know that it impoverishes the blood by demoralizing assimilation and cutting off nutrition. It lowers mental and physical vitality, deadens every element of success. It is fatal to the happiness of youth, and is the most terrible accompaniment of old age. Buoyancy flees before its terrifying glance, and cheerfulness cannot dwell in the same house with it.
“The most extensive of all the morbid mental conditions which reflect themselves so disastrously on the human system is the state of fear,” says Dr. William H. Holcomb. “It has many degrees or gradations, from the state of extreme alarm, fright, or terror, down to the slightest shade of apprehension of impending evil. But all along the line it is the same thing—a paralyzing impression upon the centres of life which can produce, through the agency of the nervous system, a vast variety of morbid symptoms in every tissue of the body.”
“Fear is like carbonic-acid gas pumped into one’s atmosphere,” says Horace Fletcher. “It causes mental, moral, and spiritual asphyxiation, and sometimes death—death to energy, death to tissue, and death to all growth.”
Yet from our birth we live in the presence and under the dominion of this demon, fear. The child is cautioned a thousand times a year to look out for this, and to look out for that; it may get poisoned, it may get bitten, it may get killed; something terrible may happen to it if it does not do so and so. Men and women cannot bear the sight of some harmless animal or insect because, as children, they were told it would hurt them. One of the crudest things imaginable is to impress into a child’s plastic mind the terrible image of fear, which, like the letters cut upon a sapling, grows wider and deeper with age. The baleful shadows of such blasting and blighting pictures will hang over the whole life and shut out the bright sun of joy and happiness.
An Australian writer says:
“One of the worst misfortunes which can possibly happen to a growing child is to have a mother who is perpetually tormented by nervous fears. If a mother gives way to fears—morbid, minute, and all-prevailing—she will inevitably make the environment of her children one of increasing dread and timidity. The background of fear is the habit or instinct of anticipating the worst. The mother who never makes a move, or allows her children to make a move, without conjuring up a myriad of malign possibilities, imbitters the cup of life with a slow-acting poison.
“I know that thousands of boys and girls are to-day tremulous, weak, passive, unalert on the physical side, simply because they were taught in the knickerbocker stage, or earlier, to see the potency of danger in all they did or tried to do. A mother assumes a terrible responsibility when from silly fears of possible injury she forbids a child such physical abandon as will promote courage, endurance, self-reliance, and self-control.”
“For more than twenty years I have made a study of criminal psychology and of infantile psychology,” says Dr. Lino Ferriani. “Thousands of times I have been compelled to recognize the sad fact that at least eighty-eight per cent, of morbidly timid children could have been cured and saved in time by means of common-sense principles of psychical and physiological hygiene, in which the main factor is suggestion