He himself recognized this and did not hesitate to use it to its fullest extent. Towards the end of his life, the method by which his patients were presented to him was calculated to make their relation to him, above all, a very personal one, and to give his influence the fullest weight. Nervous patients who came to see him, were each in his turn invited from the general waiting-room into a small ante-room just outside of Charcot's office and {72} there, in silence and dim light, asked to await the summons of the physician himself. When the time came for him to call them in, the folding doors between the rooms opened and he stood in a blaze of light inviting them to enter. Many a neurotic patient despairing of relief for symptoms that had lasted long in spite of the treatment of many other physicians, felt at once that here, in this kindly, gentle-voiced man standing so prominently in the light, was surely the long looked-for physician who would heal whatever ills there were. They came fully impressed with his power to heal, and all the valuable influence of auto-suggestion was enlisted on the side of their physician. What is true in the regular practice of medicine can be seen much more clearly in the history of those who were not physicians, but who, nevertheless, by personal magnetism, succeeded in curing various ills, or at least in lifting up patients so that they used their own natural powers of recovery to much better advantage than would have been possible if left unaided. Every successful healer has had this same personal influence, personal magnetism, call it what we will, which his patients have thought helpful to them through some direct communication, but which he himself, if he seriously studied it, and which every other thorough student of the question must realize, was due only to his power to call out the latent vitality of his patients. The mystery is not one of teledynamics, a transfer of energy from the operator, but one of awakening dormant faculties in the subject. Just why they should be dormant, since the patient so much wants to use them if he only could, is hard to understand. They do, however, lie dormant until the call of another strong personality wakens them to activity. Many people are so constituted that they cannot do effective work except under the direction of others. They lack initiative, though they may fill secondary places very well, indeed, much better often than the man of initiative who so frequently lacks capacity for details. In the same way many people are not able to bring out to the full all their own energies, even for their own bodily needs, unless under the guidance and influence of others; hence the stories of the healers that we have all down the centuries, and who have a definite place in the history of humanity and of medicine.