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This curious concatenation of names would not have occurred to anyone but a journalist intent on book-making, nor would anyone else have described them as belonging to 'three persons who have worked upon the same principle'. And indeed the book is evidently intended to entertain the general reader rather than to furnish any serious contribution to history. Adequate lives already exist of the first two of the three figures dealt with, while Freud has hitherto—as also here—been unlucky in his biographers.
The tone of the book is in keeping with the journalist aim of preferring sensationalism to sober truth. 'Each of the great fanatics of mental healing has gathered myriads (!) of disciples around him, each has astounded his contemporaries by his cures, each has shaken the qualified medical world by the prowess of his deeds, and from each a mighty stream of influence has overflowed into the scientific sphere.' And any physician, humble in his acute awareness of the imperfections of his work, would be astonished to read about 'the magnificent organization of modern medical science, incomparably perfect in its thoroughness and its many-sidedness'.
The story of Mesmer is always interesting to read and the author tells it vividly. When, however, he speaks of his work as 'the first scientific method of mental healing' any medical historian would point out that it was very far from being the first and equally far from being scientific.
Mrs. Eddy's life lends itself even more gratefully to a lurid narrative, and the author takes full advantage of the opportunity. But he is very badly out of his depth when in his final summing up he states: 'It may be, then, that Mary Baker Eddy's precise formulation will not be accepted in the future; but no mere change in terminology will affect the worldwide psychological importance of her teaching. She was one of the masters of mental healing'; or that: 'This self-taught woman, standing apart from the wisdom of the schools, has acqui