It was something to have discovered that faith, an attitude of mind, was behind cures attributed to drugs. But faith in what? The age was prolific in systems appealing to men’s credulity. There was the Graham system of diet, which Mrs. Patterson herself followed with indifferent results. There were the “botanies” and the “eclectics,” the hydropathists and the hygienists, and a score of others earnestly following out their theories and sometimes even contributing a minor element to the development of orthodox medicine.

In addition, there were the endless varieties of patent medicines and quack nostrums sold by an endless variety of scoundrels. The one virtue all the remedies had was that they might conceivably enlist the patient’s faith to the point where he would recover. But it was a desperately hit-or-miss proposition, fraught with perils.

The classic picture of all this activity at its lower extremes is to be found in Melville’s The Confidence-Man, with its subtle array of “the most extraordinary metaphysical scamps.” The confidence man, in various guises, argues that confidence, or faith, is all. A sick philosopher, says this rogue, is incurable because he has no confidence: “Because either he spurns his powder, or, if he take it, it proves a blank cartridge, though the same given to a rustic in like extremity, would act like a charm. I am no materialist; but the mind so acts upon the body, that if the one have no confidence, neither has the other.”⁷¹

Mrs. Patterson could have agreed ruefully that she had no confidence in the pellets that worked wonders with a sick neighbor; she was indeed a sick philosopher. Melville’s confidence man, on his Mississippi steamboat, took issue further with “science”—those “chemical practitioners, who have sought out so many inventions”—on the ground that they showed “that kind and degree of pride in human skill, which seems scarce compatible with reverential dependence upon the power above.” But then followed a passage which gave the game away. Hearing of a book entitled Nature in Disease, the confidence man continues: