t had left
it, and when in 1820 he had been prohibited by the Government from
practising and lecturing at Leipzig, he took refuge once more in the
neighbouring town of Coethen. From there he paid visits to Dessau as
consulting physician, and after I had explained to him as well as I
could all the symptoms of my chronic headache, he assured my mother
that he would cure it at once. He was an imposing personality--a
powerful man with a gigantic head and strong eyes and a most
persuasive voice. I can quite understand that his personal influence
would have gone far to effect a cure of many diseases. People forget
too much how strong a curative power resides in the patient's faith in
his doctor, in fact how much the mind can do in depressing and in
reinvigorating the body. I shall never forget in later years
consulting Sir Andrew Clarke, and telling him of ever so many, to my
mind, most serious symptoms. I had lost sleep and appetite, and
imagined myself in a very bad state indeed. He examined me and knocked
me about for full three quarters of an hour, and instead of
pronouncing my doom as I fully expected, he told me with a bright look
and most convincing voice that he had examined many men who had worked
their brains too much, but had never seen a man at my time of life so
perfectly sound in every organ. I felt young and strong at once, and
meeting my old friend Morier on my way home, we ate some dozens of
oysters together and drank some pints of porter without the slightest
bad effect. In fact I was cured without a pill or a drop of medicine.

And who does not know how, if one makes up one's mind at last to have
a tooth pulled out, the pain seems to cease as soon as we pull the
bell at the dentist's?

However, Hahnemann did not succeed with me. I swallowed a number of
his silver and gold globules, but the migraine kept its regular
course, right to left and left to right, and this went on till about
the year 1860. Then my doctor, the late Mr. Symonds of Oxford, told me
exactly what Hahnemann had told me--that he would cure me, if I would
go on taking some medicine regularly for six months or a year. He told
me that he and his brother had made a special study of headaches, and
that there were ever so many kinds of headache, each requiring its own
peculiar treatment. When I asked him to what category of headaches
mine belonged, I was not a little abashed on being told that my
headache was what they called the Alderman's hea