A study of the personalities of the numerous healers who have succeeded notably under various systems reveals the following general facts. Such individuals are frequently found to have been in childhood nervous, excitable, hysterical, dreamers of dreams, seers of visions, subject to auditory and visual hallucinations. They are frequently persons who have had very precocious religious experiences; they have often little education ; many are moody, self-centered, exclusive, solitary, meditative, and introspective. In adolescence and later life many have shown unusual interest in the phenomena of mesmerism, spiritualism, hypnotism, or other isms current in their day.
In short they are personalities super-sensitive to mental influences both subjective and external, and for this reason they are able to influence strongly other minds possessing in the same or less degree the same characteristics. In short, all things combined to develop a personality that could make effectual suggestions favorable to mental and physical well-being.
Barring the abnormalities and one-sidedness of such persons, the physician should possess many of their mental traits.
There seems to us to be no doubt that the cures effected in primitive times by primitive means were in reality effected through the operation of the law of suggestion upon the mind of the patient. No fair-minded person acquainted with the facts can deny that cures could and must have been made by all the means enumerated in this study. Such results from such diverse and contradictory methods can only be made intelligible by an interpretation of them as the effect of mind, directed by suggestion, upon the body. Since spiritual agencies were for ages the sole discoverable cause of disease, the cures made under such a regimen could be only mind cures, barring the occasional almost accidental use of real hygienic measures.
Miracles of Healing
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By Charles W. Waddle (1909)
Primitive Christian Worship
Hereditary genius
