sion of a Healing Saint 72

Valentine Greatrakes 134

Sir Kenelm Digby 152

King's Touch-pieces 226

F. A. Mesmer 252

John Alexander Dowie 276

George O. Barnes 290

Mary Baker Eddy 302

THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF
MENTAL HEALING

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION--MENTAL HEALING

"'Tis painful thinking that corrodes our
clay."--ARMSTRONG.

"Oh, if I could once make a resolution, and determine to
be well!"--WALDERSTEIN.

"The body and the mind are like a jerkin and a jerkin's
lining, rumple the one and you rumple the
other."--STERNE.

"I find, by experience, that the mind and the body are
more than married, for they are most intimately united;
and when the one suffers, the other
sympathizes."--CHESTERFIELD.

"Sublime is the dominion of the mind over the body, that
for a time can make flesh and nerve impregnable, and
string the sinews like steel, so that the weak become so
mighty."--STOWE.

"The surest road to health, say what they will, Is never
to suppose we shall be ill; Most of those evils we poor
mortals know From doctors and imagination
flow."--CHURCHILL.

The fact that there is a reciprocal relation between mental states and
bodily conditions, acting both for good and ill, is nothing new in
human experience. Even among the most crude and unobserving,
traditions and incidents have given witness to this knowledge. For
centuries stories of the hair turning white during the night on
account of fright or sorrow, the cause and cure of diseases through
emotional disturbances, and death, usually directly by apoplexy,
caused by anger, grief, or joy, have been current and generally
accepted. On the other hand, irritability and moroseness caused by
disordered organs of digestion, change of acumen or morals due to
injury of the brain or nervous system, and insanity produced by bodily
diseases, are also accepted proofs of the effect of the body on the
mind.

Recent scientific investigation has been directed along the line of
the influence of the mind over the body, and to that phase of this
influence which deals with the cure rather than the cause of disease.
In addition to what the scientists have