Dr. Henry A. Veazie, one of the student-heroes of the yellow-fever epidemic of 1878, who had splendid opportunity to witness the effects of fear during an epidemic, asserts that fear is a certain cause of attack of yellow fever.
I will say, parenthetically, in the way of right information relative to the South, that there has been no epidemic since 1878—twenty years; that it has been proven that yellow fever does not originate in any part of the United States, and that it is very effectively barred out at quarantine, or, if accidentally admitted, that it is easily killed by present means of treatment, and that an epidemic is no longer mentioned as a possibility—only as quite a remote memory—in New Orleans, or elsewhere in the South.
Doctor Veazie's story is corroborated by an able brochure on "The Influence of Fear in Disease," by the much-beloved, the late Dr. William H. Holcomb, of New Orleans; and, so helpful are the suggestions contained in it, that I have secured the privilege from the Purdy Publishing Company, of Chicago, of reprinting largely from it, and have added the matter copied as "Appendix A," to this volume.[5]
Doctor Veazie also called my attention to the unusual fatality attending what are called "frog-accidents." Train-handlers and yardmen employed on railroads are very liable to these "frog-accidents." The frog is that part of a switch where the rails come together, forming a "V." In running about recklessly, as a train-man generally does, he sometimes catches the sole of a boot in the "V," and wedges it in so tightly that the foot cannot be withdrawn. If a locomotive, or a car, happen to be coming towards him, and cannot be stopped in time, cutting off of the foot or the leg by the wheels upon the rails is a certain result.
If it were done instantly, and without a foreknowledge of the owner of the leg or foot, the chances of recovery would be almost assured, because of the present skill of surgery and the efficacy of known antiseptics; but with the few moments of foreknowledge of the impending accident, the poison of fearthought has time to so unnerve the system, relax the tissues, and itself disease the body by shock, that the wounding usually results in death.
There is probably no situation in which a person can be placed where the conditions are more horrible than to be wedged between the rails, and to see an eighty-ton locomotive rolling on to him with irresistible weight. Being condemned to be hanged cannot be as fearful, for the reason that the condemned has been led gradually to contemplate the possibility of death by this means, and has come to expect it with a certain amount of complacency. The terror of the "frog-accident" comes with the suddenness of its possibility and the helplessness of the situation. It is like an ice-water bath thrown on a sweating person. It is the icy hand of death come to clutch at the throat of warmest hope and fondest affections. As such, it must be fearful; but, to the person habituated to fear fear, through knowing the deadly effect of it, the emotion can be prepared for, greatly modified and possibly counteracted, by a prearrangement with the emotional self—that which Hudson calls the "subjective mind."
To be effective in case of surprise, the preparation must come from the habit-of-feeling, "I must not be afraid; I must not be afraid." No matter what the surprise, the emotional self must instantly assert, through habit, "I must not be afraid."
I have not had experience with "frog-accidents" to test the efficacy of my theory of schooled suggestion, but I have been subject to surprises that have been quite as fearful. As it happened, the incident I speak of was not perilous, but it had all the appearance of being so to me, when I was awakened from sleep, in a hotel in New York City, by suffocation, to find my room full of smoke that poured in through the transom and through the cracks of the door which was my only means of escape.
My room was on the fifth floor of the hotel, and the house had the reputation of being a "fire-trap."