BELIEFS
a complaint as dental caries may be due to mental causes
was maintained in a paper read before the American Dental
Congress in 1937. The author pointed out that children
living on a perfectly satisfactory diet may still suffer from
dental decay. In such cases, investigation generally shows
that the child's life at home or at school is in some way
unsatisfactory. The teeth decay because their owner is
under mental strain.
Mind not only makes sick, it also cures. An optimistic
patient has more chance of getting well than a patient who
is worried and unhappy. The recorded instances of faith-
healing include cases in which even organic diseases were
cured almost instantaneously.
Experimenters in hypnotism have shown that it is pos-
sible to raise a bEster by merely telling a deeply hypnotized
subject that he is being burnt. The metal which touches
the skin is cold; but the subject feels pain and displays all
the physical symptoms of a burn. Conversely, hypnotism
can be used to produce anaesthesia, even in major opera-
tions. Thus, in the late forties of last century, James
Esdaile performed over two hundred operations upon
patients anaesthetized by means of hypnosis. Esdaile's
surgical technique was pre-Listerian; nevertheless, the mor-
tality among his hypnotized patients was extremely low.
Systematic researches designed to demonstrate the exist-
ence of telepathy have been conducted at intervals during
the last fifty years. Of these the most recent and the most
considerable are those which Professor Rhine has been
carrying out at Duke University in North Carolina. Rhine's
work, which has been successfully repeated by several other
investigators, leaves no doubt as to the existence of tele-
pathy and clairvoyance and very little doubt as to the exist-
ence of pre-vision. In his presidential address delivered
before the Society for Psychical Research in 1936, Pro-
fessor C D. Broad discusses the problems raised by tele-
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