last to feel sure that she cannot walk is
fatal. And above all, and at all times, close attention to her own
motions is a great evil. We cannot swallow a pill because we think of
what, as regards the larger morsels of food, we do automatically.
Moreover, attention intensifies fatigue. Walk a mile, carefully willing
each leg-motion, and you will be tired. The same evil results of
attention are observed in disease as regards other functions over which
we seem in health to be without direct power of control.

"Mind-cure," so called, has, in some shape, its legitimate sphere in the
hands of men who know their profession. It is not rare to find among
nervous women a few in whom you can cause a variety of odd symptoms by
pressing on a tender spine and suggesting to the woman that now she is
going to feel certain pains in breast, head, or limbs. Nervous women
have, more or less, a like capacity to create or intensify pains and
aches, but when a woman is assured that she only seems to have such
ailments she is apt, if she be one kind of woman, to be vexed. These
dreamed pains--I hardly know what else to call them--are, to her, real
enough. If she be another kind of woman, if she believes you, she sets
herself to disregard these aches and to escape their results by ceasing
to attend to them. You may call this mind-cure or what you will, but it
succeeds. Now and then you meet with cases in which, from sudden shock
or accident, a woman is led to manufacture a whole train of disabling
symptoms, and if in these instances you can convince her that she is
well and can walk, eat, etc., like others, you make one of those
singular cures which at times fall to the luck of mind-or faith-cures
when the patient has not had the happy fortune to meet with a physician
who is intelligent, sagacious as to character, and has the courage of
his opinions. I could relate many such cases if this were the place to
do so, but all I desire here is to win the well woman and the
nervously-sick woman to the side of the physician. If she flies from him
to seek aid from the ignorant fanatic, she may, in rare cases, get what
her trained adviser ought to give her and she be willing to use, while
in unskilful hands she runs sad risks of having her too morbid attention
riveted to her many symptoms; for to think too much about their
disorders is, on the whole, one of the worst things which can happen to
man or woman, and wholesome self-attention is difficult, nay,