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
Because it anticipates so much that is thought to be recent in the
treatment of certain affections this paragraph is interesting from
many standpoints. Headache is typically one of the ills that in the
modern time has often been cured by suggestion. Critias knew how much
confidence Charmides had in Socrates, whom he looked upon as his
master, and that, therefore, Socrates' declaration of his power to
cure would probably be sufficient to relieve his disciple. Critias
shrewdly suggests, however, that Socrates possessed a charm which he
had learned from a distinguished royal physician. Cures in the modern
time of any kind are likely to be much more effective if they come
from a distance and, above all, if they have some connection with
royalty, or have been tried with favorable results upon distinguished
personages.
ALEXANDRIAN PSYCHOTHERAPY
When the center of interest in Greek medicine was transferred from
Greece itself to Egypt, and the Alexandrian school represented what
was best in medical thinking and investigation, we find evidence once
more of wise physicians realizing the influence of the mind on the
body and of what seemed to physicians of lesser experience the cure of
physical ills by mental means. One of the most distinguished
physicians of all time is Erasistratos, who, with Herophilus, made the
fame of the great medical school at Alexandria, {12} the first
university medical school in the world's history. Both practiced
dissection with assiduity, and, while it is Herophilus' name that is
associated with the _torcular_ within the skull, and it was he who
gave the name _calamus scriptorius_ to certain appearances in the
fourth ventricle, and otherwise stamped his personality on the study
of the brain, it is to Erasistratos that we have to turn for a typical
example of the mental physician. Erasistratos, about 300 B. C,
recognized the valves of the heart, gave them the names tricuspid and
sigmoid, and, like his great colleague, studied particularly the
nervous system. He seems to have distinguished the nerves of motion
from those of sensation, recognized their different functions and the
different directions in which they carried impulses, and thought the
brain the most important organ in the body.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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