Psychotherapy

A publication contemporary to this book is "Mother's Remedies" by Thomas Jefferson Ritter. It contains hundreds of suggestions that hindsight shows to be purely "mental" in their effect. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17439

One of the author's favorite terms is "over-solicitous". The patient literally "worrys themselves sick" over trivial symptoms and makes serious cases worse than necessary. Most of his use of psychotherapy consists of informing, diverting and cheering the patient so that worry and its consequences are not piled on top of real or imagined disease.

This book illustrates the general state of medicine in 1910. Psychotherapy was more important to medical care because so little was known of the complex physical mechanisms of the body. I particularly reacted to the discussion of hay fever because it plagued me for thirty years until experimental desensitization therapy successfully cured my case. Nonetheless, much of value has been lost with the decline of psychotherapy by the family physician. A personal relationship with the physician is often replaced with expensive impersonal technology that mostly tells what is not wrong.

Many paragraphs have bold or italic titles. These are rendered by a extra blank line—a total of two blank lines.

Obvious spelling or typographical errors have been corrected. Inconsistent spelling of names and inventive and alternative spelling is left as printed.

The outline format of the book uses these conventions: Major Topics, [Upper Case title] Sections, [Upper Case, italic title] Chapters, Minor topics, denoted by bold face and an em-dash Topic subheads denoted by italics and and em-dash