John Hunter.--Wise old John Hunter recognized the influence of the mind on the body very clearly. He said, for instance, "There is not a natural action in the body, whether voluntary or involuntary, that may not be influenced by the peculiar state of mind at the time." He lays it down as a law that "every part of the body sympathizes with the mind, for whatever affects the mind, the body is affected in proportion." He said further, "as a state of the mind is capable of producing a disease, another state of it may affect a cure." He called attention to the fact that the touch of a corpse produced wonderful effects upon the minds of patients. He said, "Even tumors have yielded to the stroke of a dead man's hand." He observes that "while we should naturally expect that diseases connected with the nerves--and those in which their alteration is in the action of parts not in their structure--would be most affected by the imagination, we find that there are other diseases in which they appear to have little connection that are much affected by the state of mind." German Mind Healing.--In his monograph on "Psychotherapy in Its Scientific Aspects" [Footnote 3] Dr. Berthold Kern calls attention to a forgotten book of the German physician Scheidemantel, published in 1787. Its title was "The Emotions as Remedies." It seems to be very rare since even our Surgeon General's Library has no copy of it. The author treated psychotherapy systematically. He insisted that man was a unit in which body and soul mutually influenced each other. Scheidemantel blamed the moralists for considering the soul exclusively and the physicians for thinking only of the body. He thought that this was a serious mistake for both sides and he seems to have anticipated much of our recent discussion on the influence of the body and {18} of things physical generally in what is called crime and various divagations from law. On the other hand, he thought that the influence of the mind on the body was one of the most important elements in therapeutics. [Footnote 3: "Die Psychische Krankenbehandlung im Ihren Wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen." Berlin 1910.] Reil, after whom the Island of Reil is named, and who taught us much with regard to brain anatomy, was also interested in the influence of mind on body. He was the professor of anatomy at Berlin in the early part of the nineteenth century and had great influence over the medical science of the time. He insisted on the recognition and development of psychotherapy and hoped to give it a place beside the medical and surgical treatment of human ills. He did much to create a current of thought in German medicine which culminated in Johann Mueller's very definite expressions with regard to the power of the mind over the body.