Healers are at all times strong characters who are helpful to others because of their own superabundant strength. The world is made up of two classes of people, lifters and leaners, and the leaners constitute by far the larger class. Most men and women are the subjects of doubts and dreads and difficulties with regard to their health, and the more time they have for introspection, the more are they likely to suffer. Unable to overcome them by themselves, they need the help of others. What they need, above all, is the reassurance that a trained strong mind can give them. The exercise of this mental influence over them, is only what corresponds to leadership in all the affairs of life. Most people need to be led and to be guided. The place of the physician is that of guide and director. The family physician of the olden time had a precious amount of influence that accrued to him from his character, and it was used to magnificent purpose. Most of his drug treatment would be looked upon as quite absurd at the present time, yet he did a great good work by lifting people up to their own highest possibilities of resistive vitality. That means more for the conquest of disease, even now, in most cases, than any remedies we possess. Often men do not realize how much their personal influence counts for. They think it is their method of treatment, or some new discovery in drugs or remedial measures, or some new phase of psychology they have hit upon, that is producing results. This makes it difficult to determine, in given cases, just what are the actual influences at work. Many men supposing themselves to be discoverers of some novel force, are merely exploiting that old-time influence of one mind over another that can be observed all down the centuries. It is interesting to study the careers of men who thought they were employing on their patients some new psychological method, when all they were exploiting was the old-fashioned influence of suggestion from a stronger personality to a weaker. A dozen times in history hypnotism has been announced as a wonderful curative agent. At present no one thinks it so, but, on the contrary, if used frequently, we think that it is much more likely to do harm than good. We went through a phase of interest in hypnotism a quarter of {77} a century ago and there are now signs of the possibility of its return in another form. In recent years we have heard much of psycho-analysis, of dominant ideas, of the auto-suggestion that comes from this, and how much benefit can be conferred on the patient by removing such ideas or revealing their unfavorable influence and so neutralizing them.