‘An influenza-like outbreak of faith-healing seems to have the public of the American continent in its grip. It is an old story, the oldest indeed in our history, and one in which we have a strong hereditary interest, since scientific medicine took its origin in a system of faith-healing beside which all our modern attempts are feeble imitations.... Once or twice in each century the serpent entwining the staff of Æsculapius gets restless, contorts, and in his gambols swallows his tail, and all at once in full circle back upon us come old thoughts and old practices which for a time dominate alike doctors and laity. As a profession we took origin in the cult of Æsculapius ... whose temples were at once magnificent shrines and hospitals.... Amid lovely surroundings, chosen for their salubrity, and connected with famous springs, they were the sanatoriums of the ancient world. The ritual of the cure is well known, and has been beautifully described by Pater in Marius the Epicurean.... The popular shrines of the Catholic Church to-day are in some ways the direct descendants of this Æsculapian cult, and the cures and votive offerings at Lourdes and Ste. Anne are in every way analogous to those of Epidaurus.’ Osler goes on to speak with much tenderness of the apparently ineradicable nature of the credulity evinced not merely by the multitude but by persons educated widely, if not well, in the matter of the healing of disease. It is indeed a portentous fact. The slightest acquaintance with the history of therapeutics, the most casual examination of the evidence of alleged cures, the faintest stirring of the reasoning faculty, as the votary asks himself whether the foremost pathologists who work continuously with the best available material in an institution devoted to the scientific study of cancer will not be more likely to arrive at a correct estimate of the probability of cure, by means other than extirpation, than a quite uninstructed _masseur_ who has taken to ‘spiritual healing,’ these, one would suppose, would be sufficient to check the growth of credulity which we see in such evidence around us. Yet the reader will probably feel that Osler is not going beyond the warrant of easily ascertainable fact when he says: ‘We must acknowledge its potency to-day as effective among the most civilised people, the people with whom education is the most widely spread, yet who absorb with wholesale credulity delusions as childish as any that have enslaved the mind of man.’ Professor Osler’s conclusion is worth quoting: