ON PHYSICAL DISEASE FROM MENTAL STRAIN. IN an address I had the honour to deliver before the St. Andrew's Medical Graduates Association in December, 1868, I took the opportunity briefly to direct the attention of those practitioners of medicine who are not specially engaged in the treatment of the insane, to the great importance of recognizing the influence of mental action on physical disease. I ventured to press the fact that the most scientific physicians have fallen into the error of studying, with too exclusive a care, the observable conditions of the body, healthy or diseased, and those agents or agencies for curing diseases which produce the most obvious effects-such as knives and other instruments, anæsthetic vapours, active drugs, heat and cold, electrical shocks, and the like. I admitted that as the pure physical existence is the groundwork and the primary necessity of the highest form of living thinking thing, it is by nature the first duty of the healer to make that corporeal frame pure and whole, but I insisted that it is equally his duty to study what shall enter by the senses or windows of the mind, and though invisibly entering, be potent forces for evil or for good. Because an agency is not visible, not tangible, is it, I asked, less real? If a man lose his mind by the loss of his blood, that, it is said, is plain to understand, for it is physical; but if some horror come upon the man through his mind, so that, like poor Horatio, he is be-chilled "Almost to jelly by the act of fear, Stands dumb, and speaks not," is not that, too, physical an action direct of mind on matter, reversing the physics of the body, and creating disease? It must be so; and in the study of this action, from the universe into the man, lies a world almost unknown. I argued further that charlatans of all kinds have, with strange acuteness, touched, without understanding it, this unknown world. They have played, it is said, on the credulity of man; they have done more; they have, in ignorance of what they were doing, reached the animal motion through the direct entrances by which the universal spirit enters also. I urged that the need for new contemplation in this direction increases with the intellectual development of the race; that the animal body, in order to maintain equality of power, and be the equal of the soul within it, must, in the course of the suns, be replaced by an organism more finely moulded, more accessible to the external beauty and harmony, more sensitive of pain, more sensible of weakness, less susceptible of maladies evidenced through matter, more susceptible of maladies evidenced through mind, and more impressionable to cure or to injury through the mind than through the baser body. And, lastly, I submitted that to study these changes of existence and action, to open this unknown world of natural truth, not to trade upon the knowledge of its existence, but to comprehend it with wisdom, are tasks to which the man of physic must either devote himself or retire with humiliation from one of the strongest holds in philosophy. The subject thus glanced at in the address to which I have referred is the key note of the present effort. I am desirous to bring before those who are most conversant with the mental side of disease, the question I have opened, from its physical point of view, and to illustrate how in many and |