o their
numbers, while the most highly educated and highly civilized classes
furnish the lowest. Immigrants furnish nearly three times as many
inmates per thousand to our American asylums as the native born.

It is, however, true that in each succeeding census a steadily
increasing number and percentage of the deaths is attributed to diseases
of the nervous system. This, however, does not yet exceed fifteen or
twenty per cent of the whole, which would be, so to speak, the natural
probable percentage of deaths due to failure of one of the five great
systems of the body: the digestive, the respiratory, the circulatory,
the glandular, the nervous. Two elements may certainly be counted upon
as contributing in very large degree to this apparent increase. One is
the enormous saving of life which has been accomplished by sanitation
and medical progress during the first five years of life, infant
mortality having been reduced in many instances fifty to sixty per
cent, thus of course leaving a larger number of individuals to die later
in life by the diseases especially of the blood-vessels, kidneys, and
nervous system, which are most apt to occur after middle life. The other
is the great increase in medical knowledge, resulting in the more
accurate discovery of the causes of death, and a more correct reporting
and classifying of the same.

In short, a careful review of all the facts available to date leads us
decidedly to the conclusion that the nervous system is the toughest and
most resisting tissue of the body, and that its highest function, the
mind, has the greatest stability of any of our bodily powers. Only one
man in six dies of disease of the nervous system, as contrasted with
nearly one in three from diseases of the lungs; and only one individual
in four hundred becomes insane, as contrasted with from three to ten
times that number whose digestive systems, whose locomotor apparatus,
whose heart and blood-vessels become hopelessly deranged without
actually killing them.

CHAPTER XIX

MENTAL INFLUENCE IN DISEASE, OR HOW THE MIND AFFECTS THE BODY

One of the dearest delusions of man through all the ages has been that
his body is under the control of his mind. Even if he didn't quite
believe it in his heart of hearts, he has always wanted to. The reason
is obvious. The one thing that he felt absolutely sure he could control
was his own mind. If he couldn't control that, what could he control?
Ergo, if man cou