Next to the welfare of the soul, no subject possesses so wide an interest as does the well-being of the body. Medicine and religion were early united in the progress of man. Esculapius held in Grecian mythology an important place among the gods. Miracles of healing have characterized every religion in the world which claimed a supernatural origin. Cures by faith and by prayer have been recorded by most if not by all of the votaries of the different great religious systems. That there is a certain element of truth in the claims of all these systems cannot be gainsaid.

The shrine of St. Anne de Beaupre, in Canada, the pool of Siloam mentioned in the Bible, the cures of faith-healers in our own land, all bear witness that in some way, not yet clearly understood, the mind exercises a great deal of influence for good or ill over the human body. The belief is almost as universal as the belief in God, and testimonials abound in all religions that the sick have been and are being cured by faith. The scientific world has been too busy with purely material things and too sceptical of spiritual things to give this matter a just hearing. There is a reaction now even among the medical men, and the spirit of investigation pervades the minds of our best thinkers. "With the advance that is being made in pathology and psychology, many diseased states are classified now and understood which a few years ago were enigmas. Go back a little way in history and we find madmen worshipped by the savages as deities, or, by their more civilized brethren, they were regarded as being possessed of devils. In madhouses they were whipped and punished to cure their supposed evil tendencies.

But the light of our more humane civilization to-day is being beneficently shed upon this very large benighted class, a class which is ever growing as the nervous systems of men become, by evolution, more developed and more highly organized. Mental diseases are absolutely increasing and allied nervous conditions are becoming alarmingly more frequent. Childhood and old age alike pay their tribute every year to the ever-increasing throng. Hereditary taint, too, plays its part more actively under the conditions of modern civilization than it did when man was in his cruder state. The biological law of the survival of the fittest is now modified.

During savagery the more feeble were not afforded the protection from the rigors of the weather and from the many sources of danger, which the unfortunate of our own day receive.

Nervous, hysterical and epileptic children receive more tender care, hence their lives are prolonged and many times they marry, perhaps a mate as degenerate as themselves, and an innocent posterity pays, with bitter suffering, for this stupendous error.

A careful student of medicine, if he has that sympathy for suffering which he should have, is many times appalled at the thought of the accumulating misery which is in store for the generations yet unborn.

What can hypnotism do for these conditions? Something, it is to be hoped, possibly not so much as could be wished. No palliative remedial agency can cure this immediate wrong. Hypnotism cannot unmake and regenerate a nervous system, which is inherently so delicate that its possessor is rendered unfit to meet the complex requirements of our modern life.

Mental disease will be the first to be treated, and, for the sake of clearness, especially for the lay reader, a very few concise definitions will be given. The following definitions of insanity are taken from Webster's International Dictionary. They are, "1. The state of being insane; unsoundness or derangement of mind: madness; lunacy. 2. Such a mental condition as, either from the existence of delusions, or from incapacity to distinguish between right and wrong with regard to any matter under action, does away with the individual responsi-bility."

The latter definition is at once the broader and the better. Alas, if all the persons who come within its scope were confined in madhouses the present accommodations for the treatment of the insane would prove very inadequate for the care of this multitude. Most people have impulses, which, if not restrained by experience, by the will, or by training, would make them madmen. A man is insane, then, whenever his mind does not show him how to place himself in right relations with society, and with his natural environments.

Bearing in mind this very broad classification the reader will have no difficulty in following what will be said upon the treatment of this class of diseases by hypnotism.

Hypnotism is of no value whenever the brain is so injured by disease that any consecutive, co-ordinate thought is impossible. Persons absolutely demented cannot he hypnotized. I have tried this experiment many times. Many persons in a demented condition do not know even their own names, and are for the most part probably ignorant of all events passing around them. This condition of course exists in all degrees, and occurs as a result of many widely different morbid states, so that whenever an increasing diseased condition of the brain impairs the power of attention by the destruction of the cortical cells of the brain, hypnotism is useless. It has not succeeded in my hands in that class of maniacs who suffer from fixed delusions. Neither has it succeeded in cases suffering from what are technically termed "imperative conceptions." (Cases suffering from various imperative concept ions are, while possessing their reason, either irresistibly led by certain impulses, or they cannot rid themselves of erroneous ideas concerning themselves and others.) Broadly, that large group of insanities accompanying organic destruction of the brain can never be cured and only very rarely benefited by hypnotism.