HEALTH AND LONGEVITY, THE GIFT OF For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he. Proverbs xxiii: 7. The leaders in the mind-cure movement have had an intuitive belief in the all-saving power of a healthy-minded attitude; in the conquering efficacy of courage, hope, and trust; and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry, and all nervous, precautionary states of mind. Their belief has in a general way been corroborated by practical experience The blind have been made to see, the halt to walk, lifelong invalids have had their health restored. The deliberate adoption of a healthy-minded attitude has proved possible to many who never supposed they had it in them; regeneration has progressed on an extensive scale, and cheerfulness has been restored to countless homes. I am sure that everybody who is able to concentrate thought and will and to eliminate superfluous emotion, sooner or later becomes a master of his body and can eliminate every kind of illness -this is the truth at the bottom of all mind cures our thoughts have a plastic power over our body. Professor JAMES in The Varieties of Religious Experience. Medical Science has doubled the expectation of human life. Dr. WALTER B. JAMES. IV HEALTH AND LONGEVITY, TH THE GIFT OF THE SUBLIMINAL HOUGHT is inextricably entangled with destiny. Thought may add beatitude to life, or thought may be damnation. The poet of the "Faerie Queene" embodied a world of truth in the postulate: "It is the mynd that maketh good or ill, that maketh wretch or happie." Every physician knows that the mental attitude of a patient is a most important factor in the treatment of his case. Belief in convalescence and a return to health is tantamount to recovery, and the doctor who understands how to instill hope and courage effects a rupture of the vicious circle wherein worry or fear or other perverted and depressing mental action perpetuates intestinal disturbances with their stases, putrefaction flora, and bacterial toxins. Distorted mental action is the immediate cause of loss of tone, which with the mental habit becomes chronic, and so invalidism results. Worry, distrust, depression, nursed grudges, make ready a soil perfectly adapted to the development of disease germs. More than this, men have actually died, where there was neither soil nor bacillus, of the symptoms of diseases suggested to them by their own imaginations. Irrefutable records of such cases exist in medical annals, and physicians deal daily with the fancysick. In epidemics, those who fearlessly administer to the stricken with the courage of their conviction of immunity are far more likely to escape than nurses and orderlies who are disqualified by dread, but who, from a sense of duty, stand by their colors. Ailments once regarded as non-contagious have become contagious because of an evolved belief that they are so. And such beliefs affect the community subconsciously, underlying prevailing conditions more deeply than we can estimate. On this very principle, Cato the Censor exclaimed against the introduction of Greek physicians into Rome. The Romans, who had been a hardy people for centuries, living in blissful ignoance of disease, developed a susceptibility to many maladies as soon as informed of their existence by the Attic practitioners. And so to-day we must go back to the psychic for the causes of disorders we recognize with our senses in the dense body. A subconscious attitude or belief which expresses itself in the ob |