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 / by James J. Walsh.
- James Joseph Walsh
- Date:
- 1912
Licence: In copyright
Credit: 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 / by James J. Walsh. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.
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![their own time, to turn to other agents and to appreciate how much their own influence on the patient and that of the patient on himself meant for the relief of symptoms and tlu; increase of resistive vitality. Some of the phases of indeliberate psychotherapy, however, are even, more interesting than this chapter of the history of genuine and deliberate psycho- therapeutics. Not a few of the remedies recommended, even by distinguished physicians, were utterly inert, yet accomplished good through their effect upon the patient's mind. If we were to omit all reference to certain favorite pre- scriptions that passed down from generation to generation, sometimes for centuries, yet eventually proved to be quite inefficient for the purpose for which they were employed, what a large lacuna would be left in the history of medical treatment! Galen's theiiac is a typical example of this. Still more strikingly the role of psychotherapy is seen in the many remedies that were recommended at various times for such self-limited diseases as erysipelas, ordinary coughs and colds, pneumonia and typhoid fever. Anything that was administered just before the change for the better came in these diseases, or that was persistently taken until that change came, was proclaimed as curative. An even more interesting chapter in the positive history of psychotherapy is that which shows how the value of genuine remedies was exaggerated by suggestion, and how these remedies became therapeutic fads, and sometimes almost seemed to be cure-alls. What a large place antimony holds in medical history, though it is now entirely discredited! How beneficent has venesection seemed, though it is now frankly confessed that it has but a narrow usefulness for a very circumscribed set of ills! Calomel in large doses has a history very like that of antimony. Alcohol in various forms, now so strikingly losing its hold in therapeutics, must also be placed in this category. Psychotherapy has perhaps had its most fruitful field of potency in con- nection with discoveries in the physical sciences. Whenever a discovery has been made in any science, an application of it to medicine has been mooted by some fertile mind, though as a rule it eventually proved to have no place in medicine. One might ordinarily expect that the suggestion would be potent only when the discovery was in one of the sciences allied to medicine, but this relation has not been necessary. Discoveries in astronomy even, in light, in electricity, in every department of physical science, have each been given their opportunity to affect patients' minds favorably, and have succeeded. Irregular Phases of Psychotherapy.—The quack has always been a psycho- therapeutist par excellence. His main stock in trade has been his knowledge of men and his power to convince them that he was able to do them good, so that he could tap all the sources of energy that were in the patient, some of them quite latent, yet of great efficiency. Often what the quack and the nostrum vender did for their patients was calculated to do harm rather than good, yet the mental energy aroused by the appeal to the patients' minds was sufficient not only to neutralize the evil, but to release curative powers tliat otherwise would not have been called out. The advertisements of the nostrum maker have ])roved especially effective, and printer's ink, properly admin- istererl, lias been a most potent remedy. Drug Therapeutics.—Many of the newer phases of mental lioaling pretend to do away with drugs. Nothing is farther from my purpose than to condemn drugs: I am simply pointing out how much supposed drug efTicacy has been](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b23984600_0023.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
