The "learned doctor" was a quick-witted soldier, and the elixir was _coloured water_ sold by order of the commander. Its potency was due to the faith of all, who persuaded each other they were getting better, and an epidemic of infectious wellness followed ills due to depressed spirits. One man after reading a list of symptoms said in great alarm: "Good Heavens. I have got that disease!" and, on turning the page, found it was... _pregnancy_. As the great Scotch physiologist, Reid, said seventy years ago: "Hope and joy promote the surface circulation of the body, and the elimination of waste matter and thus make the body capable of withstanding the causes which lead to disease, and of resisting it when formed. Grief, anguish and despair enfeeble the circulation, diminish or vitiate the secretions, favour the causes which induce disease, and impede the action of the mechanism by which the body may get rid of its maladies. An army when flushed with victory and elated with hope maintains a comparative immunity from disease under physical privations and sufferings which, under the opposite circumstances of defeat and despair, produce the most frightful ravages." The classic description of the woeful effects of imagination is in Jerome's "Three Men in a Boat". Harris, having a little time on his hands, strolls into a public library, picks up a medical work, and discovers he has every affliction therein mentioned, save housemaid's knee. He consults a doctor friend and is given a prescription. After an argument with an irate chemist, he finds he has been ordered to take beefsteak and porter, and not meddle with matters he does not understand. A sounder prescription never was penned. * * * * * CHAPTER XVIII SUGGESTION TREATMENT "To purge the veins Of melancholy, and clear the heart Of those black fumes that make it smart; And clear the brain of misty fogs Which dull our senses, our souls clog." --Burton. Hypnosis and suggestion have suffered from those people who put back every reform many years--quacks and cranks--for while science, with open mind, was testing this new treatment, the quacks exploited it up hill and down dale. Yet there is nothing supernatural in suggestion, for we employ it on ourselves and others every hour we live. Conscience consists only of the countless stored-up suggestions of our education, which by opposing any contrary suggestions, cause uneasiness. Many of us conform through life to the suggestions of others, affection, awe, hero-worship and fear taking the place of reason. The most resolute of men are influenced by tactful suggestions, which quietly "tip-toe" on to the margin of consciousness, awaken ideas which link up more and more associations, until an avalanche is started which forces itself on to the field of consciousness, the subject thinking the idea is his own.