The history of medicine is filled with records of similar "crazes" following the announcement of some new method of "cure." The striking peculiarity of these cures is that they all occur during the height of the excitement and notoriety of the early days of the announcement, while _they decline in proportion to the decline in public faith and interest_, the explanation being that in every instance the cure is effected by the action of the mental states of expectancy, faith, and the imagination of the patient, irrespective of any virtue in the method or system itself. In short, _all these cures belong to the category of faith-cures_--they are merely duplicates of the world-old cures resulting from faith in sacred relics, shrines, bones of holy people, sacred places, etc., of which nearly every religion has given us many examples. The history of medicine gives us many instances of the efficacy of the therapeutic power of Faith. Sir Humphrey Davy relates a case in which a man seriously ill manifested immediate improvement after the placing of a clinical thermometer in his mouth, he supposing that it was some new and powerful healing instrument. The grotesque remedies of the ancient physicians, and the _bizarre_ decoctions of the quacks of the present, all work cures. The "bread-pills" and other placebos of the "regulars" have cured many a case when other remedies have failed. It is related that several hundred years ago, a young English law-student while on a lark with several of his boon companions found themselves in a rural inn, without money with which to pay their reckoning. Finally, after much thought, the young man called the inn-keeper and told him that he, the student, was a great physician, and that he would prepare for him a magic amulet which would cure all diseases, in return for the receipted account of himself and friends. The landlord gladly consented, and the young man wrote some gibberish on a bit of parchment, which together with sundry articles of rubbish he inserted in a silk cover. With a wise and dignified air he then departed. Many years rolled by, and the young man rose to the position of a High Justice of the realm. One day before him was brought a woman accused of magic and witchcraft. The evidence showed that she had cured many people by applying to their bodies a little magic amulet, which the church authorities considered to be the work of the devil. The woman, on the stand, admitted the use of the amulet and the many cures resulting therefrom, but defended herself by saying that the instrument of cure had been given to her father, now deceased, many years ago, by a great physician who had stopped at her father's inn. She held that the cures were genuine medical cures resulting from the medicinal virtues of the amulet, and not the result of magic or witchcraft. The Justice asked to be handed the wonderful amulet. Ripping it open with his pen-knife, he found enclosed the identical