To achieve fortune, to judge well and command one's fellow-men, to
foretell and control the future, to be wise in worldly lore, are
natural objects of human desire; but still another is essential to
happiness. Whether we attempt to procure these good fortunes by
going early to bed and early to rise, or by more occult procedures,
we wish to be healthy as well as wealthy and wise. The maintenance
of health and the perpetuity of youth were not absent from the
mediæval occultist's search, and formed an essential part of the
benefits to be conferred by the elixir of life and the philosopher's
stone. A series of superstitions and extravagant systems are
conspicuous in the antecedents and the by-paths of the history of
medicine, and are related to it much as astrology is to astronomy,
or alchemy to chemistry; and because medicine in part remains and
to previous generations was conspicuously an empirical art rather
than a science, it offers great opportunity for practical error
and misapplied partial knowledge. It is not necessary to go back
to early civilizations or to primitive peoples, among whom the
medicine-man and the priest were one and alike appealing to occult
powers, nor to early theories of disease which beheld in insanity
the obsession of demons and resorted to exorcism to cast them out;
it is not necessary to consider the various personages who acquired
notoriety as healers by laying on of hands or by appeal to faith,
or who, like Mesmer, introduced the system of animal magnetism, or,
like some of his followers, sought directions for healing from the
clairvoyant dicta of somnambules; it is not necessary to ransack
folk-lore superstitions and popular remedies for the treatment of
disease; for the modern forms of "irregular" healing offer sufficient
illustrations of occult methods of escaping the ills that flesh is
heir to.
The existence of a special term for a medical impostor is doubtless
the result of the prevalence of the class thus named; but quackery
and occult medicine, though mutually overlapping, can by no means be
held accountable for one another's failings. Many forms of quackery
proceed on the basis of superstitions or fanciful or exaggerated
notions containing occult elements, but for the present purpose it
is wise to limit attention to those in which this occult factor is
distinctive; for medical quackery in its larger relations is neither
modern nor occult. Occult healing takes its distinctive character
from the theory underlying the practice rather than from the nature
of the practice. It is not so much what is done, as why it is done,
or pretended to be done or not done, that determines its occult
character. A factor of prominence in modern occult healing is indeed
one that in other forms characterized many of its predecessors, and
was rarely wholly absent from the connection between the procedure
and the result; this is the mental factor, which may be called upon
to give character to a theory of disease, or be utilized consciously
or unconsciously as a curative principle. It is not implied that
"mental medicine" is necessarily and intrinsically occult, but only
that the general trend of modern occult notions regarding disease
may be best portrayed in certain typical forms of "psychic" healing.
The legitimate recognition of the importance of mental conditions
in health and disease is one of the results of the union of modern
psychology and modern medicine. An exaggerated and extravagant as
well as pretentious and illogical overstatement and misstatement of
this principle may properly be considered as occult.