THE INFLUENCE OF FEAR IN DISEASE.
By Dr. Wm. H. Holcomb.
Our sanitarians are doing a good work in exploring the physical causes of disease, and endeavoring to protect the individual and the public health. But there is a higher and larger sphere of causes which they have seldom penetrated, and of whose existence even many of them seem to be ignorant. I allude to the extraordinary influence of affection and thought, or of emotion and ideas, in the causation and prevention of disease.
The body is a mirror, in which all the states of the soul are reflected. We are familiar with the wonderful effects of the will, the passions, the emotions, of the imagination, sympathy, hope, fear, faith, and confident expectation upon the physical system. We are accustomed to regard the phenomena as illustrations of the fact that the soul can, under certain circumstances, act powerfully upon the body, with the tacit assumption, however, as a general rule, that the body executes all the functions by chemical or mechanical law, without the necessary intervention of any mental influences whatever. This is the great illusion of the materialist.
Imagination, intellect, will, emotion, faith, hope, expectation, etc., are only states or modes of the soul's own life, and they are in perpetual activity, whether we are conscious of it or not. The operations of the soul of which we are not conscious, are almost infinite in comparison with the very small portion of them which comes at any moment within the range of our external consciousness. The soul organizes its own body in the womb of the mother, holds all its parts together in due order and functional activity during life, and when he quits it at death, its material tenement falls into dissolution.
The mind of man is constantly at work, silently pervading every tissue of his body by its vital influence, repeating itself in every function, throbbing in the heart, breathing in the lungs, reflecting itself in the blood, weaving its own form into every act of nutrition, realizing its own life in every sensation, and working its own will in every motion. The power of the mind over the body indeed! There is no power in the body, but in the mind, for the body is the mind, translated into flesh and blood.
When a limb is broken—the bones shattered, the flesh torn, the blood-vessels severed, the nerves lacerated, what can the surgeon or doctor do to repair the injury? A little outside mechanical work. He ligates, he stitches, he plasters, he fixes the parts in apparatus so they will remain motionless in the natural position. He can do no more. The soul which creates the body and keeps it in health, repairs it when injured. By her own occult forces she regulates the movement of the blood and development of nerve power, the chemical decomposition and re-combination, going on in every tissue, according to ideas and models implanted upon her by the Divine Mind, the Over-Soul of the universe.
The old writers call this wonderful power the vis medicatrix naturi, the curative power of nature. Swedenborg, for whom nature has no powers underived from spiritual sources, teaches that this vital power is the soul itself. His view that the soul itself acts unconsciously to our perceptions in the development and conservation of the body is advocated by Morell in his "Elements of Psychology," and is highly spoken of by Professor William B. Carpenter.
When we have constructed a true psychological pathology, we shall understand clearly why and how it is that fear can turn the hair gray in a single night; that a mother's milk can be poisoned by a moment of terror; that the heart may be paralyzed by a sudden joy or sorrow; that dyspepsia, paralysis, and many other diseases are produced by mental worry and fret and the brain-fag of overwork and anxiety. Yea, we will understand that away back of all physical causation, the roots of our disease originate in the spiritual conditions of the race, in our false religions, our false philosophies, our false way of thinking, our false relations to God and each other.
The most extensive of all the morbid mental conditions which reflect themselves so disastrously on the human system, is the state of fear. It has many degrees or gradations, from the state of extreme alarm, fright, or terror, down to the slightest shade of apprehension of impending evil. But all along the line it is the same thing—a paralyzing impression upon the centers of life which can produce, through the agency of the nervous system, a vast variety of morbid symptoms in every tissue of the body.