In most people a vicious circle of pathological subsidiary causes is formed when anything becomes the matter. Patients are persuaded that a serious illness is ahead of them. This keeps them from exercising as much as before. Becoming overcareful of their diet, they reduce it below the normal limit for healthy activity. This causes them to have less energy for work and disturbs their sleep. Then a host of minor symptoms, supposed to be due to the disease, whatever it is or they think it is, but really consequent upon the unhealthy habits that have formed, begin to develop. Just as soon as confidence in their power to regain health is restored to these people, a virtuous circle, {52} to use the Latin word virtue in its etymological sense, of strength and courage, is formed. Everything conspires to stimulate the patients; they live more naturally, the subsidiary symptoms consequent upon their bad habits disappear and the disappearance of each one of them means for the patients a new assurance of triumph over disease. They attribute every improvement to the remedy they happen to be taking, though most of them are due to the changes in their habits, their diversion of mind, and the new energy released by their sense of encouragement. An excellent example of how some of these mental persuasions in quackery act, and of how the cure is often really due to the physician who previously treated the case, though it is credited to the quack, may be found in the story that Hilton tells in his "Rest and Pain": When this patient was first seen by a surgeon, he was thought to be laboring under some disease of the bladder and kidneys, for he had severe lumbago, pain over the bladder, and offensive urine. There had been no suspicion of anything wrong as regards the spine. He was a master painter and a house decorator, and was monstrously conceited, thinking himself right and everybody else wrong. When I explained to him, after careful examination, that the spine was the cause of the symptoms, he was not satisfied with my opinion and without my knowledge consulted Sir Benjamin Brodie, who also assured him that his spine was diseased and told him that he must rest it by lying down. To this he then assented. As he could not be controlled in his own house, I persuaded him to go to Guy's Hospital, where he had got nearly well; but he was very impatient, and would not remain long enough under my care to be quite cured. He returned home, gradually improved, and was getting quite well when some pseudo friend advised hydropathy and homeopathy--it did not matter which of the two--as "the thing" to cure him. After a few months he was perfectly restored, not by either hydropathy or homeopathy, but, no doubt, by nature. The man, however, feels convinced that hydropathy and homeopathy cured him. It so happens, gentlemen, that sometimes we do not get the degree of credit which perhaps belongs to us.