FAITH CURING.

Waikato Times, Volume XXX, Issue 2420, 14 January 1888, Page 2 (Supplement)

FAITH CURING.

While sound theology condemns these modern miracles, it is impossible for pathologists and psychologists to treat th'sm so cavalierly. In them are exhibited, in a more or less legitimate manner, tho results of the action of the mind upon the bodily functions and particles. Hysteria is curable by these phenomena, sineo hysteria, after all, is only an unhealthy mastery of tho body over the mind, and is cured by this or any other stimulus to the imagination, which reverses tho position ; hut, at the same time (as Dr. Clifford Allbutt has shown in his monograph on Bright's disease), the mind can produce actual morbid anatomical changes i-.i the body, and, as the experiments of French physicians in hypnotism tend to show, even favourable structural and functional alterations. Therefore, there is no reason to doubt that faith-healing may have more positive results than we have been accustomed to allow it. Indeed, this is the conclusion drawn by Dr Buckley, in an article devoted to this subject in the Century magazine for 18S6, and it is in some degree supported by the very interesting case of hysteria in the male, with disproportionate wasting of one lower limb, recorded by Dr. Handford, of Nottingham, at p. 879.—British Medical Journal. .