For centuries we punished the sick in mind, the insane, loading them with chains, shutting them up in prison-cells, starving, yes, even flogging them. We exorcised their demons, we prayed over them, we argued with them,--without the record of a single cure. Now we treat their sick and ailing bodies just as we would any other class of chronic patients, with rest, comfortable surroundings, good food, baths, and fresh air, correction of bad habits, gentleness, and kindness, leaving their minds and souls practically without treatment, excepting in so far as ordinary, decent humanity and consideration may be regarded as mental remedies,--and we cure from thirty to fifty per cent, and make all but five per cent comfortable, contented, comparatively happy. We are still treating the inebriate, the habitual drunkard, as a minor criminal, by mental and moral means--with what hopeful results let the disgraceful records of our police courts testify. We are now treating truancy by the removal of adenoids and the fitting of glasses; juvenile crime by the establishment of playgrounds; poverty and pauperism by good food, living wages, and decent surroundings; and all for the first time with success. In short, not only have all our substantial and permanent victories over bodily ills been won by physical means, but a large majority of our successes in mental and moral diseases as well. Yet the obsession persists, and we long to extend the realm of mental treatment in bodily disease. That the mind does exert an influence over the body, and a powerful one, in both health and disease, is obvious. But what we are apt to forget is that the whole history of the progress of medicine has been a record of diminishing resort to this power as a means of cure. The measure of our success and of our control over disease has been, and is yet, in exact proportion to the extent to which we can relegate this resource to the background and avoid resorting to it. Instead of mental influence being the newest method of treatment it is the oldest. Two-thirds of the methods of the shaman, the witch-doctor, the medicine-man, were psychic. Instead of being an untried remedy, it is the most thoroughly tested, most universal, most ubiquitous remedy listed anywhere upon the pages of history, and, it may be frankly stated, in civilized countries, as widely discredited as tested. The proportion to which it survives in the medicine of any race is the measure of that race's barbarism and backwardness. To-day two of the most significant criteria of the measure of enlightenment and of control over disease of either the medical profession of a nation or of an individual physician are the extent to which they resort to and rely upon mental influence and opium. Psychotherapy and narcotics are, and ever have been, the sheet-anchors of the charlatan and the miracle-worker.