ion be assured,
but they are also more or less effective, through the power of
suggestion, as therapeutic agents.

In nervous affections, where the imagination is especially active,
amulets and healing-spells exert their maximum effect.[60:2] No one,
however cultured or learned, is wholly unsusceptible to the physical
influence of this faculty of the mind; and it has been well said that
everybody would probably be benefited by the occasional administration
of a bread-pill at the hand of a trusted medical adviser.[61:1] But
faith on the patient's part is essential. Pettigrew, in his work on
"Medical Superstitions," illustrates this by an example whose pertinence
is not lessened by a dash of humor. A physician, who numbered among his
patients his own father and his wife's mother, was asked why his
treatment in the former case had been more successful than in the
latter. His reply was that his mother-in-law had not as much confidence
in him as his father had, and therefore had failed to receive as much
benefit. Similarly, if a verbal charm is to cure a physical ailment, the
patient must first form a mental conception of the cure, and believe in
the charm's efficacy. But faith in healing-spells of human devising is
sometimes cruelly misplaced, as is shown in the following anecdote,
taken from the writings of Godescalc de Rozemonde, a Belgian theologian.
A woman, suffering from a painful affection of the eyes, applied to a
student for a magical writing to charm away the trouble, and promised
him a new coat as a recompense. The student, nothing loath, wrote a
sentence on a piece of paper, which he rolled in some rags and gave to
the woman, telling her to carry the charm always about her, and on no
account to read the writing. The woman gladly complied, was cured of her
eye-trouble, and loaned the charm to another woman, similarly affected,
who also soon experienced relief. Thereupon a natural curiosity
prompted them to examine the mystic spell, and this is what they read:
"May the Devil pluck out thine eyes, and replace them with mud!"

In "Folk-Lore," for September, 1900, there is an interesting article,
giving an account of popular beliefs current in a remote village of
Wiltshire, England, where medicines are usually regarded as charms. A
man who had pleurisy was told by his doctor to apply a plaster to his
chest. On the doctor's next visit, he was informed that his patient was
much better and that the plaster had given gr