g, command success by striking the fancies of an audience."

Edward Berdoe, in the "Origin and Growth of the Healing Art," comments
on the universality of amuletic symbols and talismans. They are peculiar
to no age or region, and unite in one bond of superstitious brotherhood
the savage and the philosopher, the Sumatran and the Egyptian, the
Briton and the native of Borneo. When a medical written charm is wholly
unintelligible, its curative virtue is thereby much enhanced. The
Anglo-Saxon document known as the _Vercelli manuscript_ by some means
found its way to Lombardy. Its text being undecipherable, the precious
pages of the manuscript were cut up, to serve as amulets.

Apropos of this subject, Charles M. Barrows, in "Facts and Fictions of
Mental Healing," remarks that whatever acts upon a patient in such a way
as to persuade him to yield himself to the therapeutic force constantly
operative in Nature, is a means of healing. It may be an amulet, a
cabalistic symbol, an incantation, a bread-pill, or even sudden fright.
It may be a drug prescribed by a physician, imposition of hands,
mesmeric passes, the touch of a relic, or visiting a sacred shrine.

Dr. Samuel McComb, in "Religion and Medicine,"[16:1] remarks that the
efficacy of the amulets and charms of savages depends upon the fact that
they are symbols of an inner mental state, the objects to which the
desire or yearning could attach itself--in a word, they are
auto-suggestions, done into wood and stone.

Professor Hugo Muensterberg has said that the less a patient knows about
the nature of suggestion, the more benefit he is likely to experience
therefrom; but that, on the contrary, a physician may obtain the better
results, the more clearly he understands the working of this therapeutic
agent.

It is also doubtless true that much good may result from the employment
of suggestion by a charlatan, in the form of a written medical charm,
both parties being alike profoundly ignorant of the healing influence
involved.

In the Talmud, two kinds of medical amulets are specified, viz: the
"approved" and the "disapproved." An approved amulet is one which has
cured three persons, or which has been made by a man who has cured three
persons by means of other amulets.[17:1] A belief in the healing power
of amulets was very general among the Hebrews in the later periods of
their history. No people in the whole world were more addicted to the
use of medicinal spells, exor