uberculosis or cancer is to a high degree beneficial,
inasmuch as it can secure sleep, appetite, and freedom from pain, three
factors which indirectly help to fight the disease. The elimination of
pain may sometimes also play its role in slight operations where other
methods of narcosis seem for any reason undesirable, and very frequently
hypnotic suggestion has been used for this purpose at childbirth.

The same importance which belongs to the removal of bodily pain in the
treatment of a peripheral disease may be given to its mental
counterpart, to the worry, excitement, and emotional shock. They all
stand in the way of a real success in any cure. Even the chances of a
dangerous operation are entirely different for the patient who goes to
it with free mind and a happy mood, with full confidence in its success,
from those of a patient who has worked himself into a state of fear and
anxiety. Here again the depression and the excitement are not in
question as symptoms of a disease, as they were when we discussed the
phobias and despondencies of the neurasthenic and of the hysteric. They
are merely normal side-effects of the bodily disease, accentuated
perhaps by a suggestible temperament. To eliminate all these emotions
means to change most helpfully the whole atmosphere of the sick-room and
to deprive invalidism of its saddest feature. This negative factor
corresponds of course most directly to the positive feature of building
up new hope and joyful expectation. He who creates confidence makes
convalescence rapid and strengthens the power to overcome disease.

It would be medical narrowness if the physician were strictly to deny
that the effect of such emotional change may sometimes lead far beyond
the ordinary suggestive influences and that in this sense the miraculous
really happens. When out of a despondent mood in a suggestible brain an
absorbing emotion of confidence breaks through, a completely new
equilibrium of the psychophysical system may indeed result. In such
cases, improvements may set in which no sober physician can determine
beforehand. Central inhibitions which may have interfered a life long
with the normal functioning of the organism may suddenly be broken down
and in an entirely unexpected way the mental influence gives to the
forces of the body a new chance to help themselves. The reasoning of the
scientific physician may easily stand in the way there. He may be afraid
of such overstrong emotion becau