Irregular Phases of Psychotherapy.--The quack has always been a psycho-therapeutist _par excellence_. His main stock in trade has been his knowledge of men and his power to convince them that he was able to do them good, so that he could tap all the sources of energy that were in the patient, some of them quite latent, yet of great efficiency. Often what the quack and the nostrum vender did for their patients was calculated to do harm rather than good, yet the mental energy aroused by the appeal to the patients' minds was sufficient not only to neutralize the evil, but to release curative powers that otherwise would not have been called out. The advertisements of the nostrum maker have proved especially effective, and printer's ink, properly administered, has been a most potent remedy. Drug Therapeutics.--Many of the newer phases of mental healing pretend to do away with drugs. Nothing is farther from my purpose than to condemn drugs: I am simply pointing out how much supposed drug efficacy has been {4} due to the mental influence on the patient of the suggestion that went with the drugs. There has been no thought at all of pushing drugs out of the extremely valuable place they occupy in medicine, for I yield to no one in my thorough conviction of their usefulness. But the efficacious element in the administration of many drugs has been entirely the confidence of the physician in them, which confidence was communicated to the patient's mind. Undoubtedly many highly recommended drugs have in themselves tended to do harm rather than good, and have been useful only because of this psycho-therapeutic element. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes' famous expression, that if all the drugs that had ever been used had been thrown into the sea instead of put into patients' bodies the human race might have been the better for it, should not be taken to mean that a great many drugs are not efficacious. Above all, it leaves out the most important consideration, that patients, while taking drugs that are either inert or at times even slightly harmful, have had their mental attitude towards themselves and their ills so favorably modified by the repeated suggestion that the result has been distinctly beneficial.