These applications of science, or rather of supposed science, illustrate the influence of suggestion. The succession of events in each case is about as follows: The definite attitude of mental expectancy is created in the popular mind. As a consequence, with the application of the new scientific principle, patients cease inhibiting the recovery that would have come spontaneously before, only that they were self-centered and had their nervous energies short-circuited. Some are benefited by the habits of life that are established as a consequence of the belief that they are about to be cured, while before this they had been largely confining themselves to their houses, and had been refusing to take recreation or get diversion because of the conviction that they were ill. Finally, many of them had no real physical ills, but were suffering from mental ailments brought on by dreads and by a concentration {46} of attention on certain portions of the body which interfered with the normal physiologic action of those parts. Whenever strong mental impressions are produced, from any cause, results will surely follow, some of them marvelous. The supposed causes of these results will seem quite absurd to those who study them afterwards, but they were living realities to the sufferers. Nothing is more calculated to produce a strong mental impression than a newly discovered scientific fact with some supposedly wonderful application to humanity. The subsequent history of the application of scientific discoveries to medicine has been as invariably the same as the primary enthusiasm over each new therapeutic agent. After a time some people were not benefited. Physicians lost confidence in the power of the new remedial measure, whatever it might be. Patients were no longer impressed by the assurance that they would be benefited, and then the new application has either completely disappeared from our list of remedies, or has remained only to be used by a few, who still report good results from it. In spite of the constancy of this succession of events, we are still quite ready to take up with enthusiasm new discoveries in science and their applications to medicine. We have not yet lost the feeling, common in earlier centuries, that all science was meant for man and that every new scientific development must have some special reference to him.