These men are not "faith healers." They are not making any war on medicine. They are, in fact, themselves physicians, graduates of the best medical schools, of excellent standing in their profession, and seeking, above all things, to increase the usefulness and precision of medical science. Already, though their labors were begun only a few years ago, they have effected numerous cures of a seemingly miraculous character; but always they have effected them by utilizing natural laws which they have discovered by the rigorous processes of scientific experiment. Of fundamental importance among these laws is one known as the law of dissociation. It might almost be called the law of forgotten memories, for to a large extent its workings depend on the interesting circumstance, to which attention has previously been drawn, that ideas which have faded from the conscious memory persist in the subconsciousness. As Pierre Janet, the distinguished Frenchman and most eminent of living psychopathologists, has tersely phrased it, "Nothing that goes into the human mind is ever really lost." No matter how remote, past experiences, as I have shown in earlier chapters, can be recovered and recalled to mind by means of crystal-vision, automatic writing, or other psychological methods of "tapping the subconscious." Obviously we have here no absolute loss of memory, but merely a splitting off, or "dissociation," from the field of waking consciousness. Now, while the memories thus dissociated and lying hidden in the subconscious usually exercise no appreciable effect other than in the molding of character, the enlargement of our store of knowledge, etc., there are conditions under which, in the case of persons predisposed by circumstances of heredity or environment, they may give rise to all manner of mental and physical ills. A person, for instance, experiences a sudden fright. Time passes, the fright is completely forgotten, or, at most, vaguely remembered. But one day unmistakable, and sometimes exceedingly peculiar, symptoms of disease appear. The victim, it may be, suffers from a strange obsession or "fixed idea," or from a general "nervous breakdown," or from an actual paralysis of some bodily organ, or from the development of abdominal or other enlargements resembling true organic growths. Whatever the symptoms, the mechanism of the puzzling malady is always the same. There has been an abnormal dissociation. The ideas connected with the original shock, although submerged beneath the threshold of consciousness--in a word, forgotten--remain vividly alive in the subconscious, to act as perpetual irritants of the nervous system and in time to give rise to the appearance of the symptoms of which the sufferer complains. Often, indeed, the dissociation is instantaneous, and the appearance of the disease symptoms equally rapid.