The Mind Cure

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Apr 11, 1878

It is not a new nostrum, nor a new "school" in medicine. It is old as the world, and besides it is, as the advertisers of pills and potions say, "indorsed by the faculty." The "Mind Cure" is recognized by all learned doctors, and yet because it is theoretically recognized and practically forgotten, we wish to speak "a word by way of admonition."

The finest curative agency in the world is the mind of the patient. We do not mean to say that you can cure corns and bunions by resolving to dispense with them, or that you can restore your lungs, after disease has destroyed them, by having a cheerful temper, or that cancers can be eradicated by a hopeful heart. The "Mind Cure" is not warranted to act as a "specific" for everything. But there is no medicine that is susceptible of such a variety of uses as this. There is no disease in which the state of the mind has not much to do with the state of the body.

The first thing to do then is to keep a clean conscience. The man who defiles his life with sin, suffers a terrible retribution often in his body; not that he feels any keen pang of remorse, but everything that impairs one's self-respect hurts the vitality and shortens the life. One does not need to be killed by such a spot as that which stained the hands of Lady Macbeth in order to suffer in life and health for sins unshrived. It is enough that one cannot look one's conscience in the eye, enough to depress the thermometer of the heart, and by subtle sympathy impair the life.

Physicians prescribe travel and sanitaria; they send one man to Minnesota and another to Florida, without taking the temperament of the man into account. We have seen a man acting Chief of Police in St. Paul, who had been carried ashore from the steamboat on stretchers, so far was he reduced by hemorrhages. Climate? Yes, and more than climate. Doubtless he was a man of hearty temperament, and enjoyed the new and strange scenes about him. We have seen a hundred invalids in the same climate pine for home and older civilization, and die of nostalgia. Let it be understood that no invalid is benefited by a climate when he stays in a place an hour after that stay is enjoyable. If you are an invalid, arrange your life so that it may be restful and happy to you, and then enjoy it. We recall a man, a bridge-builder, who carried his consumption over bleak and snowy prairies, who slept in cold beds in frontier taverns, coughing all night, who built bridges and drove business when his lungs were all wasted away. He said that he was happy at work, and that work had kept him alive. And it did. Year after year he managed to spin out his broken life, happy always and making all about him happy, until he became a walking miracle. At last came the catastrophe, and he died. If your business amuses you, and you are succeeding, and you can keep your temper happy, then there is no better medicine. But he who has a distasteful business, and who has not the will or the power to adapt himself to it, is indeed to be pitied.

Life insurance companies thump your ribs and listen to the whispers of your heart. They ask about your father and your grandfather and your mother's sister and the father's brother. They want to know whether you have had any or all of the following diseases, etc. But when did a life insurance company ever think to ask about your clear conscience, your cheerful heart, your business success, your amiable domestic relations, your religious faith, and all the rest that go to make sunshine and clouds in your life?

Do not listen to anybody who tells you to travel if travel is uncongenial to your temper. But if you enjoy it, then is travel best of all medicines. An invalid struggling for life should not have any duties. The main business at such a time is to enjoy yourself. Joy is a tonic above all.—Hearth and Home.