Thinking Health.--Hudson in "The Law of Mental Medicine" [Footnote 14] suggests that we should think health and talk health on all suitable occasions, remembering that under the law of suggestion health, as well as disease, may be made contagious. This expression probably represents an important element for the prophylaxis of disease under all conditions. Under present conditions people talk entirely too much about disease and have too many suggestions of pathological possibilities constantly thrown around them by our newspapers, our magazines and by popular lecturers as well as by our free public libraries. People have learned to think and talk disease rather than health. This predisposes them to exaggerate the significance of their feelings, if it does not actually, on occasion, lower their resistive vitality because of solicitude. The medical student torments himself with the thought that he is suffering from the diseases that he studies, and we cannot expect that the general public will be even as sensible as he is in this matter. On the contrary, people generally are much more liable to exaggerate the significance of their feelings, hence the necessity for healthy suggestions rather than innuendoes of disease. [Footnote 14: McClurg, Chicago, 1903.] In recent years, to paraphrase Plato's expression, people are much more {100} inclined to educate themselves in disease than in health. The result has been a storehouse of unfavorable suggestion, from which ideas are constantly being taken to make whatever symptoms that may be present seem unduly important. Consequently people look for the worst, and suggest themselves into conditions where not only are they exaggerating their symptoms, but they are absolutely preventing the flowing down of such nervous impulses as will enable them to overcome affections that are present. Whenever anything turns up that lessens their tendency to unfavorable auto-suggestion, their health improves. Hence the taking, with confidence, of any quack medicine, no matter what its constituents, cures them; hence the success of the numerous and very varied forms of mental treatment. New Thought, Eddyism, osteopathy, and the like, attain most of their successes because of the removal of unfavorable suggestions, and the setting up in their stead of favorable suggestion. In psychotherapy the first duty of the physician is to undo all the unfavorable suggestion at work, and, if successful in that, great therapeutic triumphs are possible. CHAPTER III THE INFLUENCE OF BODY ON MIND