VII. Do not condemn, or oppose, unnecessarily, the simple prescriptions of your patients. Yield to them in matters of little consequence, but maintain an inflexible authority over them in matters that are essential to life. VIII. Preserve, upon all occasions, a composed or cheerful countenance in the room of your patients, and inspire as much hope of a recovery as you can, consistent with truth, especially in acute diseases. The extent of the influence of the will over the human body, has not yet been fully ascertained. I reject the futile pretensions of Mr. Mesmer to the cure of diseases, by what he has absurdly called animal magnetism. But I am willing to derive the same advantages from his deceptions, which the chemists have derived from the delusions of the alchemists. The facts which he has established, clearly prove the influence of the imagination, and will, upon diseases. Let us avail ourselves of the handle which those faculties of the mind present to us, in the strife between life and death. I have frequently prescribed remedies of doubtful efficacy in the critical stage of acute diseases, but never till I had worked up my patients into a confidence, bordering upon certainty, of their probable good effects. The success of this measure has much oftener answered, than disappointed my expectations; and while my patients have commended the vomit, the purge, or the blister which was prescribed, I have been disposed to attribute their recovery to the vigorous concurrence of the _will_ in the action of the medicine. Does the will beget insensibility to cold, heat, hunger, and danger? Does it suspend pain, and raise the body above feeling the pangs of Indian tortures? Let us not then be surprised that it should enable the system to resolve a spasm, to open an obstruction, or to discharge an offending humour. I have only time to hint at this subject. Perhaps it would lead us, if we could trace it fully, to some very important discoveries in the cure of diseases. IX. Permit me to advise you in your intercourse with your patients, to attend to that principle in the human mind, which constitutes the association of ideas. A chamber, a chair, a curtain, or even a cup, all belong to the means of life or death, accordingly as they are associated with cheerful or distressing ideas, in the mind of a patient. But this principle is of more immediate application in those chronic diseases which affect the mind. Nothing can be accomplished here, till we produce a new association of ideas. For this purpose a change of place and company are absolutely necessary. But we must sometimes proceed much further. I have heard of a gentleman in South-Carolina who cured his fits of low spirits by changing his clothes. The remedy was a rational one. It produced at once a new train of ideas, and thus removed the paroxysm of his disease.