through the eyes, the ears, taste, smell and touch. We are victims of it at every turn, unless we learn to become positive-minded and proof against suggestion in all its forms.
There is not space for me to do more than mention other ways by which we are unconsciously affected and influenced by suggestion. Newspaper and magazine advertising of patent medicines are most potent and powerful mediums of suggestion. We have already mentioned the effect of being told day by day, in our paper and by means of hoardings, to take a certain make of pills. But modern ideas of advertising worthless nostrums and harmful drugs leave such methods of advertising far behind as regards suggestive force and value. Pictures of people sneezing, and of others doubled up with painful backs, can have only one effect, and that is, to make people imagine that they possess the ailment described. I remember when a boy, reading in the papers of that day, long advertisements which were headed; “What is this new disease that is come upon us?” I was so affected that I became convinced that I had the disease, and badly too. I became so alarmed that I would no doubt have speedily became really ill, if I
