The story of the suggestive use of drugs shows us many suggestions employed even by distinguished physicians, men whose work is eminently rational and has lived long after their time. In fact, very few, even of the most distinguished physicians, have failed to extol remedies which later proved to be quite ineffectual. Hippocrates felt quite sure that an external application of snake skin was a cure for all forms of that chronic skin manifestation, lichen. Pythagoras declared that anise seed held in the hand was an excellent remedy for epilepsy. These are only examples which serve to show how much suggestion has been used unconsciously by the medical profession. The sensation {26} produced by the touch of the viper's skin was sufficient in some patients to bring about a change in the circulation in the skin, or perhaps a distinct modification of the nerve impulses on which trophic conditions in the skin depend, and this may have produced some cures on which Hippocrates founded his recommendation. We know that the skin can be unfavorably affected directly through the nervous system, and there is no good reason for thinking that it may not also be affected favorably. In our own day we have seen the suggestive influence of an operation act as a remedy in epilepsy and have lauded it for a time. It is, therefore, not surprising that Pythagoras saw, as he thought, the strong scent of the anise seed act favorably. Both of these conclusions as to the causative agency at work were wrong, because it was suggestion and not the operation in most cases, nor the anise in any case, which caused the improvement. THERAPEUTIC PERSUASION It is not only in the distant past, however, but also in quite modern times that these therapeutic persuasions have existed among physicians, and as a result physicians have frequently recommended and employed remedies that we now know not only to have been quite useless, but sometimes even harmful. A typical example of this is the use of antimony, originally discovered and studied by Basil Valentine, an alchemist who had busied himself much with the nature of substances, vegetable and mineral, and with their action as remedies for disease. Sir Michael Foster hailed him as the first of pharmacologists, and said: "The old monk did not care for the problem of the body; all he sought to understand was how the constituents of the soil and of plants might be treated so as to be available for healing the sick and how they produced their effect."