PARALYSE CURED BY ROUSING IRE.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17830, 26 April 1926, Page 12

PARALYSE CURED BY ROUSING IRE.

LONDON, March 4. Curing’ illnesses by the use of the imagination was the subject of an address at the Royal Society of Medicine yesterday by Dr Gustave Monod; of Paris, who told a curious story of a cure effected by David Gruby, a Hungarian scientist, of the nineteenth century. Gruby’s method, he said, relied on his Unsurpassable originality. For instance, being called to see a patient helplessly paralysed, he asked her to show him the oil she used in the. kitchen. A bottle was produced, and Gruby calmly started pouring out its contents on the carpet. The invalid jumped up: “ Confound you, my best Persian rug! ” She was cured. Of this sort of healer none was a prophet at home. The Hungarian scored in France. The Frenchman, M. Coue, won his reputation in America and in Great Britain. Dr Monod showed that imagination was the most ancient method of treatment—in fact, the only method up to the time of Hippocrates. The seed and the soil, he said, must be considered. The seed—or rather, the method of sowing-- varied. The favourable soil was practically always the same: it was the mental attitude of a patient ready to accept any kind of suggestion. A condition of expectancy must exist, or must be worked up. The pro sent condition of general mental instability in the world, of universal Jack of criticism, was very much in favour of anyone who wished to work on imagination rather than on ordinary common-sense,