re
than a six-months pregnancy. As it happened, this woman had a friend
who a short time before had developed a pseudo, or hysterical
pregnancy which continued for several months. My patient, accepting
the suggestion, was prepared to imitate her. I gave her a punch or
two and told her to go and dress for luncheon. In the afternoon she
had returned to her normal size.

Another woman, suffering from chronic constipation, was firmly
convinced that her bowels could not move without a cathartic, which I
refused to give. However, I did give her some strychnine pills,
carefully explaining that they were not for her intestines and that
they would have no effect there. She did not believe me, and promptly
began to have an evacuation every day. It seems that sometimes two
wrong ideas are equal to a right one.

If doctors fully realized the power of suggestion, they would be more
careful than they sometimes are about suggesting symptoms by the
questions they ask their patients.

A patient of mine with locomotor-ataxia suffered from the usual train
of symptoms incident to that disease. It turned out, however, that
many of the symptoms had been suggested by the questions of former
physicians who had asked him whether he had certain symptoms and
certain disabilities. The patient had answered in the negative and
then promptly developed the suggested symptoms. When I told him what
had happened, these false symptoms disappeared leaving only those
which had a real physical foundation.

Another patient, a young girl, complained of a definite localized
pain in her arm, and told me that she was suffering from angina
pectoris. As we do not expect to find this disease in a young person,
I asked her where she got such an idea. "Dr. ---- told me so last
May." "Did you feel the pain in this same place before that time?" I
asked. She thought a minute and then answered: "Why no, I had a pain
around my heart but I did not notice it in my arm until after that
consultation." The wise physician lets his patients describe their own
symptoms without suggesting others by the implication of his
questions.

=Autosuggestion.= Of course we must remember that an idea cannot
always work itself out immediately. Conditions are not always ripe. It
often lies fallow a long time, buried in the subconscious, only to
come up again as an autosuggestion, a suggestion from the self to the
self. If some one tells us that nervous insomnia is disastrous, and we
bel