When sleeplessness can be directly traced to mental causes, the Emmanuel treatment, if experiments made both in Boston and Northampton are to be trusted, is as surely a specific as quinine for malaria. If in any instance medical diagnosis can find no physical reason for the sleeplessness, Emmanuel treatment is at once in order.

The sufferer is admitted to the Rector’s study. The very atmosphere encourages frank speaking. Concealment of any fact or circumstance which bears upon the case is prejudicial to improvement. I have once after three treatments refused again to see a patient who had failed to give me her whole confidence, until she was willing to speak out with greater freedom. The physical habits are invariably considered and corrected whenever there is need. Deep breathing is prescribed. Dr. Learned’s method is sometimes suggested, and always Dr. Noble’s. Drugs are from the first withheld. Tea, coffee, and all other stimulants which act directly on the brain are banished from the evening meal. The sufferer is encouraged as the bedtime hour draws near to give himself to such interests as scatter the cares and worries and obsessions which are then wont to gather like a cloud around the patient’s head.

For some a social evening is suggested, provided it be not too exciting. For others the theatre, the symphony, or other form of public entertainment serves the same purpose. For perhaps a larger number, especially the preacher, or the teacher, or the literary worker, a magazine, a novel with no miserable modern problem in it, or a standard history will in a half-hour let down the mind to the sleep level. I know one man who found Parkman’s histories a soporific boon; another whom Green’s longer History of the English People led on each night to wholesome sleep; another, the head of a large sanitarium, who sometimes saves himself from sleeplessness by reading after he has gone to bed as dull a book as he can find, and recommends the same plan with some profit to his patients.