Another patient, a young girl, complained of a definite localized
pain in her arm, and told me that she was suffering from angina
pectoris. As we do not expect to find this disease in a young person,
I asked her where she got such an idea. "Dr. ---- told me so last
May." "Did you feel the pain in this same place before that time?" I
asked. She thought a minute and then answered: "Why no, I had a pain
around my heart but I did not notice it in my arm until after that
consultation." The wise physician lets his patients describe their own
symptoms without suggesting others by the implication of his
questions.

=Autosuggestion.= Of course we must remember that an idea cannot
always work itself out immediately. Conditions are not always ripe. It
often lies fallow a long time, buried in the subconscious, only to
come up again as an autosuggestion, a suggestion from the self to the
self. If some one tells us that nervous insomnia is disastrous, and we
believe it, we shall probably store up the idea until the next time
that chance conditions keep us awake. Then the autosuggestion "bobs
up," common sense is side-tracked, we toss and worry--and of course
stay awake. An autosuggestion often repeated becomes the strongest of
suggestions, successfully opposing most outside ideas that would
counteract it,--reason enough for seeing to it that our
autosuggestions are of the healthful variety.

At the base of every psycho-neurosis is an unhealthful suggestion.
This is never the ultimate cause. There are other forces at work. But
the suggestion is the material out of which those other forces weave
the neurosis. Suggestibility is one of the earmarks of nervousness. A
sensible and sturdy spirit, stable enough to maintain its equilibrium,
is a fairly good antidote to attack. "As a man thinketh in his heart,