Psychotherapy: Including the History of the Use of Mental Influence, Directly and Indirectly, in Healing and the Principles for the Application of Energies Derived from the Mind to the Treatment of DiseaseWalsh, James J. (James Joseph)
Science
Psychotherapy: Including the History of the Use of Mental Influence, Directly and Indirectly, in Healing and the Principles for the Application of Energies Derived from the Mind to the Treatment of Disease
Walsh, James J. (James Joseph)
Mental healing
The temples in Egypt, in Assyria, in Greece, were much like the health
institutions--"cure houses," as the expressive German phrase calls
them--of our day. Pictures of the temple of AEsculapius at Epidaurus
show a magnificent building with beautiful grounds, ample bathing
facilities, and evidently many opportunities for a quiet, easy life
far from the worries and bustle of the world and with everything that
would suggest to the patient that he must get well. This phase of
psychotherapy in the olden time is not only interesting in itself, but
furnishes a valuable commentary on corresponding modern institutions,
since it shows that it is not so much the physical influences, which
have differed markedly at different periods, as the mental attitude so
constantly influenced at these institutions which was the real
therapeutic factor.
Now our sanatoria are nearly all founded on some special principle of
therapeutics. Some of them have dietetic fads and no food out of which
the life has been cooked is eaten. Some of them are absolutely
vegetarian. Some of them depend on wonderful springs in their
neighborhoods, others on certain forms of exercise, still others give
the rest cure. All succeed in relieving many symptoms. No one who has
analyzed the cures effected will think for a moment that it is the
special therapeutic fad of the institution that accomplishes all the
good done for patients suffering from so many different complaints.
Similar ills often are affected quite differently, and, while some are
relieved, others are not. Those who fail to be cured at one will,
however, often be relieved at another. It depends on how much
influence of mind is secured over the patient and how much diversion
from thoughts of self is provided.
MIND HEALING IN GREECE
When Greece awoke to the great literary and scientific discussion of
human thought that gave us such philosophic and scientific thinkers as
Hippocrates, Plato and Aristotle, then psychotherapy, in the formal
sense of caring for the mind of the patient as well as for his body,
came to be explicitly recognized as having therapeutic value.
Hippocrates insisted that medicine was an art rather than a science,
that personality had much to do with it, and that the patient must be
optimistically influenced in every way. The first of his aphorisms is
well known, but few realize all of its significance. Hippocrates
declares that "life is short and art long, the occasion fleeting,
experience fallacious and judgment difficult. The physician must not
only be prepared to do what is right himself, _but also to make the
patient, the attendants and externals cooperate."_ No one emphasized
more than he the necessity for differentiating the individual patient,
and to him we owe, in foundation at least, the aphorism that it is
more important to know what sort of an individual has a disease than
what sort of a disease the individual has, for the chances of cure
greatly depend on favorable individuality.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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