A rudimentary knowledge of electricity is sufficient to assure us that the vast majority of popular electrical appliances - such as belts and pads - are absolutely inert, and that the good they undoubtedly achieve in some cases is due to the stimulating effect on the imagination. † If the public confidence is shaken, cures no longer take place, as was clearly demonstrated in the recent notorious electropathic belt trial. I am acquainted with a civil engineer of good standing in his profession, who assured me he had been cured of lumbago of very long standing by one of these belts, and he actually gave the proprietors a testimonial to that effect, which was widely published. The exposure in court of the inertness of the appliance opened this patient's eyes, and he acknowledged that the cure was largely due to imagination and suggestion. Next time he gets lumbago he will seek a new specific which will appeal to his imagination in a different way, for he thinks himself much too clever for orthodox medical treatment. Anti-rheumatic rings, cholera-belts, camphor-bags, and such-like ' preventives,' probably act in a similar way.

Therefore, though these and kindred contrivances do not operate in the expected manner, I should be sorry to say that they do not serve a useful purpose; by inspiring confidence and keeping alive hope, they often enable their possessor to go unharmed in the midst of contagion, or help him to overcome disease; for there is no more effectual depressant, no surer harbinger of disease,than fear. Much of the immunity from infection enjoyed by physicians and nurses is due partly to the preoccupation of their minds, which leaves no room for selfish terror, and partly to the confidence begotten by long familiarity with danger.

* Revue Hbdominaire, 1882, p. 36.

† Vide letter by Dr. Steavenson in Lancet and British Medical Journal, October 16, 1889. Professor Ballin, the eminent authority on nervous diseases and physician to the Hotel Dieu, Paris, attributes at least one half of the effects of electro-therapeutics to suggestion acting on the patient's mind (' Neurasthenia,' translated by Dr. Campbell Smith, 1908 edition, p. 188).

The plan of substituting a harmless draught for the narcotic mixture, without which a nervous patient thinks himself unable to sleep, is, as we all know, continually resorted to, and is an instance of the beneficial employment of the imagination.

Drs. Beard and Rockwell relate how they experimented on rather a large scale with patients in a New York hospital with inert drugs. On one occasion, to see what imagination would do, they suddenly had the patients in a ward informed that a mistake had been made by the dispenser, and that an emetic had been administered to some of the patients instead of the usual mixture. A large proportion of the patients were thereupon seized with vomiting, and brought up the harmless dose which had been given to them. * This effect of the imagination it is not difficult to understand, but Dr. J. W. White, Professor of Clinical Surgery in the University of Pennsylvania, has collected a large number of instances showing the beneficial effects of surgical operations perse. Hospital surgeons are not supposed to be particularly imaginative, land yet Dr. White tabulates hundreds of cases which he has brought together from recently published medical journals, English, American, and foreign.

For instance, he records fifty-six cases of trephining for epilepsy in which nothing abnormal was found to account for the symptoms, and yet twenty-five of these cases were cured, and eighteen improved. *

* ' Sexual Neurasthenia,' New York, 1890.

In thirty epileptic cases a bloodvessel was ligatured, generally one of the vertebral arteries, and cure had resulted in fourteen cases, whilst fifteen were improved. In nine cases the operation was tracheotomy, and two of these were cured, and six greatly improved. Dr. White instances several cases in which exploratory incisions under chloroform have revealed no disease, but have been followed by the cure of symptoms simulating disease, and from his experience he feels justified in considering that 'there are large numbers of cases of different grades of severity and varying character which seem to be benefited by operation alone, some of them by almost any operation, †

The cure of warts by charms and spells is, I believe, a matter of common belief in every village in England. A medical friend practising in the country told me not long ago that he had twice excised a number of warts from a boy of thirteen, and each time a new crop had soon grown. An old village woman recited some apparently childish formula over them, and behold ! the warts withered away, and in a few days had fallen off and disappeared. My friend is extremely orthodox, and did not at all understand nor approve of such interference with his patient.

There was an interesting discussion on the cure of warts by suggestion at a meeting of the Societe d'Hypnologie et de Psychologie in June, 1902. Many physicians testified to having seen charms succeed in some cases and fail in others, and Dr. Farez showed a series of photographs taken of a girl's hand he had cured by hypnotic suggestion after charms had failed. Dr. Berillon stated that to test the discriminating powers of suggestion he had in a very bad case treated only one hand, and that this was speedily cleared of warts, while the other remained disfigured until he applied hypnotic suggestion * to that also.

* The extraordinary number of perforated skulls found in neolithic monuments was puzzling to antiquarians until the theory was adopted that they were the results of trephining for epilepsy. The success of the operation must have encouraged the men of science of those days to hold to their belief that the demon of epilepsy was expelled through the hole thus made.

† Annals of Surgery, St. Louis, 1891.