Psychotherapy : an eclectic approach / Sol L. Garfield.

  • Sol L. Garfield
Date:
[1980], ©1980
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Psychotherapy : an eclectic approach / Sol L. Garfield. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    latter should be considered as more physically efficacious in its tonic properties. Asafetida, musk and some preparations of the genital organs of animals that used to be in the pharmacopeia, owed most, if not all, of their power, whatever it was, to the mental effect of their odor and the feeling of deterrence that had to be overcome before they were taken. There is a precious therapeutic secret in this use of deterrent, repugnant, frightful materials which patients use to advantage under certain circum- stances. It illustrates the influence of the mind over the body, and emphasizes the fact that such influence can be exerted in the full only when a deep im- pression is produced upon the patient. Whether this can be imitated without deceit, and without the use of undignified methods, must depend on the physi- cian himself and his personality. There can bo no doubt that there is a won- derful power here to be employed. It must be the physician's business to find out in each individual case, according to his own personal equation, just how he may be able to use at least some of it. It is Avell worth studying and striving for, because nothing is more potent for psychoneurotic conditions, and for neuroses on the borderland of the physical, than which no ailments are more obstinate to treatment. CHAPTER X INFLUENCE OF THE PERSONALITY IN THERAPEUTICS Though it has seldom been fully realized and has probably never been appreciated as in our time, one of the most important factors in therapeutics, in every period of the history of medicine, has been the personal influence of the physician. Therapeutic fashions have come and gone, new drugs have been introduced, have had their day and then been relegated to the limbo of worn- out ideas. At all times, however, physicians have succeeded in doing good, or at least using, with apparent success, the therapeutic means of their own time, however crude and inadequate these afterwards proved to be. They have succeeded in shortening the progress of disease as well as increasing the patient's resistive vitality and thus enabled him not infrequently to survive where otherwise a fatal termination might have occurred. All unsuspected during most of the time, it was the personal influence of the physician that counted for most in all of the historical vicissitudes of therapeusis. It mat- tered not that the means he employed might seem absurd to the second suc- ceeding generation, as was so often, indeed almost invariably, the case, his personal influence has at all times overshadowed his available therapeutic auxiliaries. In spite of all our advance in scientific medicine, to a consid- erable degree this remains true even at the present time, and to fail properly to use this important auxiliary is to cripple medical practice. Place of Personal Influence.—When the antitoxins and directly curative serums seemed about to make for themselves a place in therapeusis, it looked for a time as though this personal element might be entirely superseded. It seemed that all other therapeutic factors must give way to definitely accurate doses of antitoxic principles, directly opposed to the toxins of disease and
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