Enthusiasm is Good Medicine

Wrong thinking can result in illnesses according to Dr. Norman Vincent Peale as explained in this excerpt from his book Enthusiasm Makes the Difference:

Dr. Paul Tournier, a celebrated European psychiatrist, in his book The Healing of Persons develops the thesis that wrong thinking can have physically devastating effects. He says, “Most illnesses do not, as is generally thought, come like a bolt out of the blue. The ground is prepared for years, through faulty diet, intemperance, overwork, and moral conflicts, slowly eroding the subject’s vitality. When at last the illness suddenly shows itself, it would be a most superficial medicine, which treated it without going back to its remote causes.” Quoting a fellow doctor, Dr. Tournier adds: “Man does not die. He kills himself.”

A patient was sent to our clinic at Marble Collegiate Church by an upstate physician, who said, “This man is actually killing himself by abnormal depression. I know of no medication that can heal him. Give him some fresh enthusiasm for living or he may die.” Fortunately we were able to help the man to take the “medicine” of enthusiasm, and he not only lived but overcame his depression.

Dr. Tournier points out that “every act of physical, psychological or moral disobedience of God’s purpose is an act of wrong living and has its inevitable consequences.” Many doctors whose technique is that of treating the patient, rather than the disease, and who are perhaps not so religiously oriented as is Dr. Tournier, nevertheless subscribe to this doctor’s conclusions as to the effect of hate, evil, gloom, and depression on mankind.

One doctor, for example, who states that he never attends church services or uses any religious terms, told of one patient who died of “grudgitis.” He defined this as “a deep sickening hatred so virulent in nature that toward the end his breath became unbelievably foul, the body organs seeming to deteriorate at once.” Then he added, using a quotation with which I was surprised to know he was familiar, “The wages of sin is death.”