posed
principal occupations of the doctor are the smallest and rarest elements
in his experience.

A few years ago a writer of world-wide fame deliberately stated, in the
course of a carefully considered and critical discussion of various
forms of mental healing, that it was no wonder that these methods
excited huge interest and wide attention in the community, because, if
valid, they would have such an enormous field of usefulness, seeing that
at least seven-tenths of all the suffering which presented itself for
relief to the doctor was imaginary.

This, perhaps, is an extreme case, but is not far from representing the
general impression. If a poll were to be taken of five hundred
intelligent men and women selected at random, as to how much of the
sufferings of all invalids, or sick people who are not actually
obviously "sick unto death" or ill of a fever, was real and how much
imaginary, the estimate would come pretty close to an equal division.
But when one comes to try to get at the actual facts, an astonishingly
different state of affairs is revealed. I frankly confess that my own
awakening was a matter of comparatively recent date.

A friend of mine was offered a position as consulting physician to a
large and fashionable sanatorium. He hesitated because he was afraid
that much of his time would be wasted in listening to the imaginary
pains, and soothing the baseless terrors, of wealthy and fashionable
invalids, who had nothing the matter with them except--in the language
of the resort--"nervous prosperity." His experience was a surprise. At
the end of two years he told me that he had had under his care between
six and seven hundred invalids, a large percentage of whom were drawn
from the wealthier classes; and out of this number there were _only
five_ whose sufferings were chiefly attributable to their imagination.
Many of them, of course, had comparatively trivial ailments, and others
exaggerated the degree or mistook the cause of their sufferings; but the
vast majority of them were, as he naively expressed it, "really sick
enough to be interesting."

This set me to thinking, and I began by making a list of all the
"imaginary invalids" I had personally known, and to my astonishment
raked up, from over twenty years' medical experience, barely a baker's
dozen. Inquiries among my colleagues resulted in a surprisingly similar
state of affairs. While most of them were under the general impression
that at least t