There are however a great many organic diseases in which the will may serve an extremely useful purpose in the relief of symptoms and sometimes in producing such a release of vital energy previously hampered by discouragement as will enable the patient to react properly against the disease. This is typically exemplified in tuberculosis of the lungs. Nothing is so important in this disease, as we shall see, as the patient's attitude of mind and his will to get well. Without that there is very little hope. With that strongly aroused, all sorts of remedies, many of them even harmful in themselves, have enabled patients to get better merely because the taking of them adds suggestion after suggestion of assurance of cure. The cells of the lungs that have been destroyed by the disease are not reborn, much less recreated, but nature walls off the diseased parts, and the rest of {104} the lungs learn to do their work in spite of the hampering effect of the diseased tissues. When fresh air and good food are readily available for the patient, then the will power is the one other thing absolutely necessary to bring about not only relief from symptoms, but such a betterment in the tissues as will prevent further development of the disease and enable the lungs to do their work. The disease is not cured, but, as physicians say, it is arrested, and the patient may and often does live for many years to do extremely useful work. In a disease like pneumonia the will to get well, coupled with the confidence that should accompany this, will do more than anything else to carry the patient over the critical stage of the affection. Discouragement, which is after all by etymology only disheartenment, represents a serious effect upon the heart through depression. The fullest power of the heart is needed in pneumonia and discouragement puts a brake on it. As we shall see it is probably because whiskey took off this brake and lifted the scare that it acquired a reputation as a remedy in pneumonia and also in tuberculosis. In spite of what was probably an unfavorable physical effect, whiskey {105} actually benefited the patient by its production of a sense of well being and absence of regard for consequences. Hence its former reputation. This extended also to its use in a continued fever where the same disheartenment was likely to occur with unfortunate consequences on the general condition and above all with disturbance of appetite and of sleep. Worry often made the patients much more restless than they would otherwise have been and they thus wasted vital energy needed to bring about the cure of the affection under which they were laboring.