'suggestion' so effective in the many-coloured hysteria, come to our aid in more noxious maladies, if no more than on the fringe of them, I should repeat that the advantage would be so indefinite, so relatively small, and so well to be attained by ordinary spiritual visitation, as not to be worth the peril of the moral perversion which hangs only too closely around these good intentions, the peril of imposing upon, even of bamboozling, the patient. We must remember the saying of Lavoisier, 'Medicine came into the world with a twin brother, called charlatanism.'
Clifford Allbutt.
Extract from Sir Clifford Allbutt's paper in the British Medical Journal, June 18, 1910:
'Spiritual gifts may or may not consist in the insertion of a new entity, they certainly do consist in a reanimation and remodelling of thinking matter in the uppermost strands of the brain, and probably of some other, perhaps even of all the other, molecular activities of the body. Probably no limb, no viscus is so far a vessel of dishonour as to lie wholly outside the renewals of the spirit; and to an infinite intelligence every accession of spiritual life would be apparent in a new harmony ([Greek: syngymnasia]) of each and all of the
