ends the fields in
which they may operate. Proper suggestion let fall into these unknown
depths or improper suggestion as well, becomes an incalculable force in
shaping the ends of life. We have here, then, well attested truths or
laws--it is difficult to know what to call them--which help us to
understand the bases of faith healing or mental healing by suggestion.
Now directly we turn to such records as remain to us we find that such
forces as these have been in action from the very beginning. All disease
was in early times referred generally to spirit possession. If only the
evil spirit could be exorcised the patient would get well and the priest
was, of course, the proper person to undertake this. Religion and
medicine were, therefore, most intimately united to begin with and
healing most intimately associated with magic. The first priests were
doctors and the first doctors were priests and what they did as priests
and what they did as doctors were alike unreasonable and capricious.
The priest and his church have very unwillingly surrendered the very
great hold over the faithful which this early association of medicine
and religion made possible. Any order or institution which can approach
or control humanity through the longing of the sick for health, has an
immense and unfailing empire.

_Demon Possession the Earliest Explanation of Disease_

There are, says Cutten, three fairly well defined periods in the history
of Medicine. The first, beginning as far back as anything human begins
and coming down to the end of the second century; the second, ending
with the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries; and the third from perhaps
the sixteenth century on. The second period, he adds, was by far the
most sterile and stationary of the three "largely due to the prohibitive
attitude of the Church. The science of Medicine, then, is almost wholly
the result of the investigations and study of the last period. This
means that medicine is one of the youngest of the sciences, while from
the very nature of the case it is one of the oldest of the arts."

Demon possession was, as has been said, the earliest explanation of
disease. This would naturally be true of a time almost wholly wanting in
any conception either of law or any relation of cause and effect beyond
the most limited regions of experience. Since the only cause of which
man had any real knowledge was his own effort he peopled his world with
forces more or less like himsel