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Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy by Josephine A. Jackson;Helen M. Salisbury
page 19 of 353 (05%)
surgical operations, in a vain attempt to cure a disease of the
personality. Physical measures have been given a good trial, but few
would contend that they have succeeded. Sometimes the patient has
recovered--in time--but often, apparently, despite the treatment
rather than because of it. Sometimes, in the hands of a man like Dr.
S. Weir Mitchell, results seem good, until we realize that the same
measures are ineffective when tried by other men, and that, after all,
what has counted most has been the personality of the physician rather
than his physical treatment.

No wonder that most doctors have disliked nervous cases. To a man
trained in all the exactness of the physical sciences, the apparent
lawlessness and irresponsibility of the psychic side of the
personality is especially repugnant. He is impatient of what he fails
to comprehend.

=All Mind and no Body.= This unsympathetic attitude, often only half
conscious on the part of the regular practitioners, has led many
thousands of people to follow will-o'-the-wisp cults, which pay no
attention to the findings of science, but which emphasize a
realization of man's spiritual nature. Many of these cults, founded
largely on untruth or half-falsehood, have succeeded in cases where
careful science has failed. Despite fearful blunders and execrable
lack of discrimination in attempting to cure all the ills that flesh
is heir to by methods that apply only to functional troubles, ignorant
enthusiasts and quacks have sometimes cured nervous troubles where the
conscientious medical man has had to acknowledge defeat.

=The Whole Man.= But thinking people are not willing to desert science
for cults that ignore the existence of these physical bodies. If they
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