In one of our great hospitals here it has been the custom for a long time to use for treatment by suggestion a tuning-fork which is known at that hospital as a magnet. It is not a magnet; it is merely an ordinary, plain, rather large tuning-fork. But people have, as you know, a very curious superstition about the action of magnets, and believing this tuning-fork to be a magnet, they attribute occult and wonderful powers to it. When placed upon a supposedly paralyzed limb or on the throat of a person who thinks he cannot speak, it has wonderful powers just because it is supposed to be a magnet, when in fact it is a tuning-fork. I remonstrated once with the gentleman who uses this tuning-fork because, so far as I could see, it was a lie, like all other forms of quackery; but he said, "Why, no, it does a great deal of good; it cures the patients." I replied that I had no doubt of that. So does skunk oil and Omega oil; so does the magic handkerchief which Francis Truth has touched; so does the magic ring, the electric belt, and the porous plaster. They all cure, but they all deceive people, in so far as one supposes that something is going on which is not revealed, something like imaginary electricity in the ring, something like the supposed medical activity in the porous plaster. In another great hospital in this city electricity is used in the same way. Electricity has medical action of course, in some cases, but it is used also in a great number of cases where it is not supposed to have any medical action because it has so strong a psychical action. When one sees a brass instrument that looks like a trident approaching one's body, and feels long crackling sparks shoot out of its prongs against one's body, it naturally makes a very strong impression upon one's mind. How psychological methods may be employed in everyday life was the subject of an address by Professor Hugo Münsterberg, of Harvard University, before the Commercial Club of Chicago, December 13, 1908. The success of these methods in the field of medicine is attested by the constantly increasing number of cures of nervous and other affections. "There is no magic fluid," he said, "no mysterious power afloat; it is just a state of mind. Every one can suggest something to every one else. It is the idea that is strong enough to overcome the idea in another mind that produces the effects wondered at. Hypnotism is only reënforced suggestion. It is a tool which no physician should be without."