SUGGESTION (continued 2)

If I were a doctor

If I were a doctor, not merely a man with a “sheep-skin,” but a real doctor, a man who had goods to deliver, a man who could say, “I will cure, or accept no pay,” I would have an office of three rooms and have all my skeletons in the first room; reversing the usual arrangement of our present wise doctors, it should be a gloomy room and I would hire sick people—awfully sick people—to sit around the room so that when a patient entered he would have sickness suggested very strongly, and would know that he was sick; and after the sick people had told him how awfully sick they were, their “minds” being full of sickness, and he had that thought of sickness thoroughly emphasized, I would have him step into another room that had minor surgical instruments on display and lesser suggestions of sickness. Then I would invite him into my office where I would be sitting in the shadows so that he could not readily perceive the involuntary and unconscious expressions that would appear in my face as he told me of his illness. My office would be bright and full of flowers, and birds, and pictures of health; no stuffed animals, but live ones; I should try to have a smile on my face, and the moment he took a seat, responding to the suggestion of the present environment, he would say to me, “Why, doctor, I feel better already.” And he would feel better, because from every suggestion of sickness I should have carried him into a room that was full of every suggestion of health. No drugs, no odor of drugs, no instruments, no death’s head calendars; but life, in expression, in plants, in flowers, in birds, in animals; I would have surrounded him with health. And, good reader, he could go away with no drugs, but with a memory of that office that would make him feel better.