Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery
A Boston physician with a folklorist’s habits, Robert Means Lawrence set out in 1910 to explain why so many discredited cures once appeared to work. Across nineteen chapters he works through medical amulets, talismans and phylacteries, the royal touch for the King’s Evil, healing spells and runic inscriptions, the temples of Esculapius, the blue-glass craze that peaked in 1877, metallo-therapy, animal magnetism, two chapters on music as a remedy, and the long trade of the professional quack. His thesis never shifts: the virtue lay not in the object or the potion but in the patient’s imagination, worked on by suggestion. Lawrence presents all of it as the prehistory of modern mental healing rather than simple folly. An appendix sketches ten irregular practitioners, among them Paracelsus, Nostradamus and Cagliostro.
