it is the effect, if it brings
cure where before there was disease. If you put into a man's body a
drug that you do not understand, and find that it cures a disease and
relieves a pain, will you throw the drug aside because you do not
understand it? And why do you throw the power of imagination aside
because you cannot weigh it in your balance, nor find that it
depresses one scale more than the other? Imagination is one of the
subtlest powers of thought: imagination is one of the strongest powers
that the doctor might utilise when his drugs fail him and his old
methods no longer serve his purpose. Suggestion, the power of thought.
Why, there are records of cases where suggestion has killed! That
which has killed can also cure, and man's body being only a product of
thought, built up through the ages, answers more rapidly to its
creator than it does to clumsier products from the mineral and
vegetable kingdoms. Here again I only ask experiment. You know that
you can produce wounds upon the body of the hypnotised patient, in a
state of trance. By suggestion lesions are made, burns are caused,
inflammation and pain appear by the mere suggestion of a wound. A
blister is placed on a patient and forbidden to act; the skin is
untouched when the blister is removed: a bit of wet paper is given by
thought the qualities of the blister, and it will raise the skin, with
all the accompaniments of the chemical blister. Now these things are
known. You can see the pictures of wounds thus produced, if you will,
in some of the Paris hospitals, for along this line the Frenchman is
investigating further than the Englishman has done. And along that
line also lies much of useful experiment to be brought to the relief
of the diseases of humanity.

But as I have touched upon medicine, let me say--for I ought here to
say it--that there are some methods of modern medicine which Theosophy
emphatically condemns. It declares that no knowledge which is gained
from a tortured, a vivisected creature, is legitimate, even if it were
as useful as it has been proved to be useless. It declares that all
inoculations of disease into the healthy body are illegitimate, and it
condemns all such. It declares that all those foul injections of modern
medicine which use animal fluids to restore the exhausted vitality of
man are ruinous to the body into which they are put. Here again France,
by the very excess of its methods, is beginning to recoil before the
result