Those cults which are either founded upon faith healing or involve it have a long ancestry. George Barton Cutten's very suggestive book[8] makes that clear enough and supplies an informing mass of detail. Medical Science and Psychology have been slow to take into account the facts thus submitted, but they have of late made amends for their somewhat unaccountable delay, and we have now reached certain conclusions about which there is little controversy except, indeed, as to the range of their application. Beneath all faith healing and kindred phenomena there are three pretty clearly defined bases. First, the action or reaction of mind upon body; second, the control of mental attitudes by the complex of faith; and, as an interrelated third, the control of the lower nerve centers by suggestion.

The Bases of Faith and Mental Healing

There is an almost baffling interplay of what one may call these three controlling principles, and the exhaustive discussion of the whole subject demands the knowledge of the specialist. But we do know, to begin with, that just as there are demonstrated bodily approaches to both the mental and spiritual aspects of life, so there are equally undeniable mental and even spiritual approaches to physical conditions. We have here to fall back upon facts rather than upon a definite knowledge of what happens in the shadowy border-land across which the mind takes over and organizes and acts upon what is presented to it by the afferent nervous system. Nothing, for example, could be really more profound than the difference between waves of compression and rarefaction transmitted through the luminiferous ether and the translation of their impact into light. Somewhere between the retina of the eye, with its magic web of sensitive nerve ends, and the proper registering and transforming regions of the brain something happens about which Science can say no final word.

What happens in the case of light is equally true of sound and tactual sensation. That vivid and happy consciousness of well-being which we call health is just the translation of normal balances, pressures and functionings in the mechanism of the body into an entirely different order of phenomena. Health is a word of manifold meaning and if its foundations are established in the harmonious coÖperation of physical processes, its superstructure rises through mental attitudes into what, for want of a more clearly defined word, we call spiritual states. Two orders meet and merge within us. Above a world of idea, insight, desire and subordination of means to ends, the whole driven by the will and saturated with emotion, a world which has its contacts with the unseen and eternal and derives its strength from the truly immaterial; below a world of material and forces in subjection to the laws of physics and chemistry and involved in the processes of the conservation and transformation of physical energy, and consciousness the clearing-house for the whole.

Cannon's Study of Emotional Reactions Upon Physical States

This interplay of body and mind has of late been made the subject of careful and long continued experimentation with a special reference to the reactions of strong emotion upon bodily states, particularly as registered in chemical changes. These experiments have been carried on with an almost incredible patience and attention to detail under the most difficult circumstances, and their conclusions seem final. Professor Walter B. Cannon of Harvard University has recently put the result of such investigation at our service in a most interesting way.[9] (It ought to be said, however, that a similar series of experiments repeated at the laboratories of the University of Chicago failed to produce the same results.)

Strong emotion affects almost every physical region, modifies almost every physical function. The normal secretion of digestive fluids is greatly increased by hunger (though here, of course, hunger itself may have a physical basis) and also by what the investigator calls sham feeding—food, that is, taken by an animal and so deflected as not to pass into the digestive tract at all stimulates the gastric flow quite as much as if it were actually received into the stomach. On the other hand unhappy emotional disturbance greatly retards the digestive processes. Pain, for example, results in pronounced inhibitions of the secretion of gastric juice while happy emotional states produce naturally the opposite effect. Pain is often accompanied by nausea, indeed the nausea of a sick headache may be only secondary, induced by a pain springing from quite another source than retarded digestion.

Professor Cannon's experiments are most interesting as he traces the variations of the flow of adrenal secretion induced by emotion and then retraces the effect of the chemical changes so produced upon bodily and mental states. The secretion of adrenin[10] is greatly increased by pain or excitement. The percentage of blood sugar is also greatly increased by the same causes. The heaviness of fatigue is due, as we know, to poisonous uneliminated by-products resulting from long continued or over-taxing exertion of any sort. Under the influence of fatigue the power of the muscles to respond to any kind of stimulus is greatly reduced. (It is interesting to note, however, that muscular fibre detached from the living organism and mechanically stretched and relaxed shows after a period the same decrease in contractability under stimulation.) On the other hand any increase in adrenal secretion results in renewed sensitiveness to stimulation, that is by an increased power of the muscle to respond. Falling blood pressures diminish proportionately the power of muscular response. Rising blood pressure is effective "in largely restoring in fatigued structures their normal irritability" and an increase of adrenin seems to raise blood pressure by driving the blood from the interior regions of the body "into the skeleton muscles which have to meet, by extra action, the urgent demands of struggle or escape."

Adrenin is of real use in counteracting the effects of fatigue or in enabling the body to respond to some unusual call for effort. The coagulation of the blood is also affected by the same agent, that is, it coagulates very much more rapidly.[11] Coagulation is also hastened by heightened emotion; a wound does not bleed so freely when the wounded one is angry or excited. A soldier, then, in the stress of combat is not only rendered insensible to fatigue and capable of abnormal activity, but his wounds are really not so dangerous as they would otherwise be. There are here suggestions of elemental conditions having to do with struggle and survival, conditions which play their very great part in the contests of life.

Emotions set free, as has been said, larger percentages of sugar which are immediately utilized by the muscles in heightened or fatiguing effort. All these experiments point very clearly to reservoirs of power, both physical and mental, upon which we may draw in times of stress and under emotional excitement.[12] Such emotionally induced chemical actions and reactions as have been indicated release these stored energies, render us for the time being unconscious of fatigue and even guard us against the too rapid exhaustion of vital power. Whatever heightens emotion, therefore, modifies the very chemical structure of the body.

The Two Doors

There are other changes as well. The breath is quickened, the lungs are expanded, waste products are very much more rapidly eliminated and so in answer to summoning states of the soul the body as a whole readjusts itself in marvellous subtle forms, mobilizing all its forces for the contests which the emotion anticipates, or indeed which the emotion itself calls out. And if all this seems unduly technical it is only to bear out with something like a scientific accuracy the statements made a little earlier that two orders meet and merge within us and that the reactions of our loves, our fears, or our longings upon our bodily processes may be stated in terms of the test tube and the chemist's scale.

Such changes as are thus registered react in turn upon mental attitudes. Fatigue produces mental depression. An accumulation of uneliminated waste darkens all our horizons; irritability of mind and soul attend physical irritability; any unhappy modification in the balance of the physical registers automatically an equally unhappy modification in the balance of the psychic. Most of us, as we come to know ourselves better, recognize marked alterations even in spiritual states which we are taught to refer to physical condition, but just as truly altered spiritual conditions produce altered physical states. There is an endless give and take and there are, therefore, two doors of approach to our pains, wearinesses and sicknesses.

The Challenge of Hypnotism

Medicine, surgery and hygiene as at present organized largely approach personal well-being from the physical side. They have for their support a body of fact and a record of accomplishment which cannot be put out of court without sheer intellectual stultification. Modern medicine has been so massively successful in dealing with disease on the basis of a philosophy which makes everything, or nearly everything, of the body and nothing or next to nothing of the mind, that medicine was in danger of becoming more sheerly materialistic than almost any other of our sciences; Physics and Chemistry had their backgrounds in which they recognized the interplay of realities too great for their formulÆ and forces too subtle for their most sensitive instruments. But medicine was almost in the way of forgetting all this when it was compelled—and that for its own good—to take account of an entirely different set of forces.

This was, to begin with, as far as the modern scientific approach is concerned, first made clearly apparent in Hypnotism. Hypnotism seems to be such a modification of normal mental conditions under the power of commanding suggestion as really for the time being to focus consciousness and mental action generally in one suggested line. A new set of inhibitions and permissions are thus imposed upon normal consciousness. Attention is withdrawn from the usual frontiers (if one may use the word) to which, consciously or subconsciously, it has always been directed and centered upon one single thing.[13]

The hypnotized person becomes, therefore, unconscious of any reporting agencies outside the field of his abnormally focused attention. Normal conditions of pain or pleasure cease for the time to become real. Attention has been forced entirely out of normal channels and given a new direction. Then we discover, strangely enough, that though those messages of the afferent nerves cease to have any effect upon the subject, the imaginings of the subject carried back along outgoing lines produce the most unexpected results in physical states. If a postage stamp be placed upon the hand of the hypnotized subject and he be told that the stamp is a mustard plaster, the stamp reddens the skin and presently raises a blister. In other words, heightened and intensified expectant attention is able to produce the same results as an irritating agency.[14]

Changed Attention Affects Physical States

We are concerned here chiefly with the fact and it is a fact capable of far-reaching application. Of course the nature and extent of the changes thus produced are the battlegrounds of the two schools. Medical Science is quite willing to admit that while functional action may thus be modified no real organic changes can be produced. There is a border-land so much still in shadow that no final word can be said about the whole matter, but it is incontestably true that modifications of attention have a reflex in the modification of physical states.

A pain which is not registered does not, for the time being at least, exist, and if the attention can either through hypnotism or by a persistent mental discipline be withdrawn from disturbing physical reports, then the conditions which produce them will at least be left to correct themselves without interference from consciousness and since the whole tendency of disturbed physical organism is to correct itself, the whole process probably goes on more quickly as it certainly goes on with less discomfort if attention is withdrawn.[15] The assumption of health is a tremendous health-giving force and if the condition to be remedied is really due to a mental complex which needs only some strong exertion of the will or readjustment of attitude to change, then marvellous results may follow changed mental and spiritual states. The apparently dumb may speak, the apparently paralyzed rise from their beds, the shell-shocked pull themselves together and those under the bondage of their fears and their pains be set free. There are so many illustrations of all this that the fact itself is not in debate.

The Power of Faith to Change Mental Attitudes

Now since mental attitudes so react upon bodily states, whatever strongly controls mental attitudes becomes a very great factor in mental healing. There is a long line of testimony that what may be called the complex of faith does just this with unique power, for faith implies supernatural intervention. If there be anywhere an all-prevailing power whose word is law and we could really be persuaded that such a power had really intervened—even if it actually had not—on our behalf and brought its supernatural resource to bear upon our troubled case, then we should have a confidence more potent in the immediate transformation of mental attitudes than anything else we could possibly conceive. If we really believed such a power were ready to help us, if we as vividly expected its immediate help, then we might anticipate the utmost possible therapeutic reaction of mind upon body. A faith so called into action should produce arresting results, and this as a matter of investigation is true.

In following through the theories of faith healing we may take here either of two lines. The devout may assert a direct divine interposition. God is. He has the power and the will; all things are plastic to His touch; He asks only faith and, given faith enough, the thing is done and there is no explaining it. Those who believe this are not inclined to reason about it; in fact it is beyond reason save as reason posits a God who is equal to such a process and an order in which such results can be secured. This is rather an achievement of faith than reason but the Christian Church generally has held such a faith—a faith sustained by the testimony which favours it and unaffected by the testimony which challenges it. The scientific temper which seeks economy in all its explanations and asks only for a cause sufficient for the effect and which is, moreover, constantly trying to relate the unknown to the known, takes another line and finds in faith healing just one more illustration of the power of mind over body. This does not exclude God but it discovers Him in resident forces and finds in law the revelation of His method. The conclusions, then, to which we are generally coming may not only be reconciled with a devout faith, they may, when followed through, enrich faith; but they do subdue the whole great matter to a sequence of cause and effect and they are gradually finding a satisfactory explanation for what has heretofore been deeply involved in mystery.

Just as Hypnotism, through the very dramatic abnormality of it, in altering the sensitiveness of those physical tracts from which attention is withdrawn or in producing physical effects through suggestive focusing, has helped us to understand the part which attention plays in the flux of physical states, so our later studies of the subconscious help us here. We do know that a great deal may really take place in personality of which consciousness takes no account. Consciousness in its most active phases is alert, purposeful and preoccupied with the immediate concern of the moment. Consciousness heeds commands and takes account of such conditions as strongly assert themselves, but does not in its full drive take much account of suggestion unless the suggestion possesses unusual force. Suggestions usually need leisurely turning over in the mind and the mind commonly refers them—often without knowing it—to those regions of mental action which lie beneath the threshold of strongly focused consciousness.

But suggestion does not thereby cease to work. It starts processes all its own which go on till they are worked through. After a longer or shorter period of incubation the outcome of suggestion is lifted into the light of consciousness, often to produce results all the more striking because we cannot explain them to ourselves or any one else. All this does not withdraw such phenomena from the realm of law; it only clothes them with the mystery of the unknown and extends the fields in which they may operate. Proper suggestion let fall into these unknown depths or improper suggestion as well, becomes an incalculable force in shaping the ends of life. We have here, then, well attested truths or laws—it is difficult to know what to call them—which help us to understand the bases of faith healing or mental healing by suggestion. Now directly we turn to such records as remain to us we find that such forces as these have been in action from the very beginning. All disease was in early times referred generally to spirit possession. If only the evil spirit could be exorcised the patient would get well and the priest was, of course, the proper person to undertake this. Religion and medicine were, therefore, most intimately united to begin with and healing most intimately associated with magic. The first priests were doctors and the first doctors were priests and what they did as priests and what they did as doctors were alike unreasonable and capricious. The priest and his church have very unwillingly surrendered the very great hold over the faithful which this early association of medicine and religion made possible. Any order or institution which can approach or control humanity through the longing of the sick for health, has an immense and unfailing empire.

Demon Possession the Earliest Explanation of Disease

There are, says Cutten, three fairly well defined periods in the history of Medicine. The first, beginning as far back as anything human begins and coming down to the end of the second century; the second, ending with the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries; and the third from perhaps the sixteenth century on. The second period, he adds, was by far the most sterile and stationary of the three "largely due to the prohibitive attitude of the Church. The science of Medicine, then, is almost wholly the result of the investigations and study of the last period. This means that medicine is one of the youngest of the sciences, while from the very nature of the case it is one of the oldest of the arts."

Demon possession was, as has been said, the earliest explanation of disease. This would naturally be true of a time almost wholly wanting in any conception either of law or any relation of cause and effect beyond the most limited regions of experience. Since the only cause of which man had any real knowledge was his own effort he peopled his world with forces more or less like himself, except that they were invisible, who operated practically the whole of natural phenomena. There was a spirit for every place and every happening; spirits for fields and hearths, thresholds and springs. Some of them were friendly, some of them naturally unfriendly, but they were everywhere in existence, everywhere in action and naturally if they were unfriendly they would from time to time and in various most curious ways get into the body itself and there do any amount of mischief.

The priest-doctor's task, therefore, was to get them out. He might scare them out, or scold them out, or pray them out, or trick them out. He would use his medicine as much to make the place of their temporary abode uncomfortable for the demon as remedial for the patient and, indeed, the curious and loathsome things which have been used for medicines might well disgust even a malevolent demon. One thing stands out very clearly and that is that whatever the medicine did or left undone, it worked through its influence upon the mind of the patient and not through any real medicinal value.

The Beginnings of Scientific Medicine

Of course along with all this would go a kind of esoteric wisdom which was part of the stock in trade of the healer. There were charms, incantations and magic of every conceivable sort. The medicine man of uncivilized or even half-civilized peoples really makes medicine for the mind rather than the body. There were, however, gleams of scientific light through all this murky region. The Egyptians knew something of anatomy though they made a most capricious use of it and there must have been some knowledge of hygienic methods; the prohibitions of Leviticus, for example, and of the Jewish law generally for which the Jew must have been, as far as medical science is concerned, somewhat in debt to the Egyptian and the Chaldean, really have sound hygienic reasons behind them. The Greeks began with demons but they ended with something which approached true science.

The real contribution of Greece, however, seems to have been on the positive rather than the negative side. They made much of health as an end in itself, had gods and goddesses of physical well-being. The Greek had constantly held before him such an ideal of physical excellence as had never before been approached and has never since been equalled. He seems to have been abstemious in eating; he practiced the most strenuous physical exercises; he lived a wholesome outdoor life, and so created a civilization in which health very largely took care of itself. An examination of what records remain to us hardly sustains the accepted opinion that the Greeks had made substantial advances along purely scientific lines,[16] but at any rate as far as medicine goes, there is little to choose between the Greece of the fourth century before Christ and the Europe of the sixteenth century after, save that the life of the Greek was far more normal, temperate and hygienic and the mind of the Greek more open, sane and balanced.

[16] Probably too strong a statement. For an opposite view strongly supported by a scholar's research see Singer's article in "The Legacy of Greece" (Oxford Press), p. 201.