Happiness as Found in Forethought Minus Fearthought

by Horace Fletcher

The summer of 1888 was signalized by a moderately severe epidemic of yellow fever at Jacksonville, Florida, and a very extensive epidemic of fear throughout the Southern states. The latter disease was much more contagious than the former, and much less amenable to treatment. This mental malady visited every little town, village, and railway station, and kept the people in a chill of trepidation for many weeks. This causeless and senseless terror originated many precipitate and unjust measures of self-defense. Under its influence public and private rights were disrespected, and the panic greatly intensified. In a few cases the refugee was driven from the door, the hungry left unfed, the sick unattended. There was exhibited on a small scale, here and there, that same principle of terror which is manifested in a burning theatre, on a sinking ship, or in a stampeded army, when brave men suddenly become cowards, and wise men fools, and merciful men brutes.

Truly, something ought to be done for the moral treatment of yellow fever.

I will relate an anecdote of Dr. Samuel Cartwright, of Natchez, Mississippi, which furnishes an ideal type for the mental treatment of yellow fever.

It was away back in the thirties, and yellow fever was prevailing in New Orleans, and the places above it were in a state of watchful fear. A young Northern teacher, trying to return home, started from Woodville, Mississippi, and arrived at Natchez about midnight in a high fever. Dr. Cartwright was immediately called in. Early in the morning he summoned the officers of the hotel and all the regular boarders into the parlor and made them a little speech. "This young lady," he said, "has yellow fever. It is not contagious. None of you will take it from her; and if you will follow my advice you will save this town from a panic, and a panic is the hotbed of an epidemic. Say nothing about this case. Ignore it absolutely. Let the ladies of the house help nurse her, and take flowers and delicacies to her, and act altogether as if it were some every-day affair, unattended by danger. It will save her life, and perhaps in the long run many others."

It was agreed to by all but one person—a woman, who proceeded to quarantine herself in the most remote room of the establishment. The young teacher got well, and no one was sick in the house but the self-quarantined woman, who took yellow fever from fear, but happily recovered.

By his great reputation and his strong magnetic power, Dr. Cartwright dissipated the fears of those around him, and prevented an epidemic. For this grand appreciation and successful application of a principle—the power of mind and thought over physical conditions, a power just dawning on the perception of the race—he deserves a nobler monument than any we have accorded to heroes and statesmen.

The sanitarians of the present day would think on the contrary that Dr. Cartwright was worthy of condemnation and imprisonment. Dr. Cartwright, however, honestly believed that yellow fever was not a contagious disease. At that time the non-contagionists were numerous, learned, experienced, and respectable. The contagionists, however, finally carried the day in the face of innumerable evidences of non-contagion, which, strangely enough, have now about ceased to exist. Whether they transformed a non-contagious into a contagious disease by repeated and violent asseverations, which played upon and hypnotized the professional and public mind, is a subtle point for psychological investigation, not likely to be made by the present generation of doctors.

Can a non-contagious disease become contagious by mental action? The power of fear to modify the currents of the blood and all the secretions, to whiten the hair, to paralyze the nervous system, and even to produce death is well known. Its power to impress organic changes upon the child in the womb through the mother's mind is well established. When yellow fever is reported about and believed to be imminent and contagious, fear, combined with a vivid imagination of the horrors and woes of the pest, can precipitate sickness which will take on the form and color present to the thought, and yellow fever may spread rapidly from person to person, all through the medium of the mind. "Everything," said a great philosopher, "was at first a thought."

We see a non-contagious disease in the very process of transformation into a contagious one in the case of pulmonary consumption. It was observed occasionally that one of the married partners who had nursed the other through the disease fell a victim after a while to the same malady. Doctors and people began to suggest contagion. The cases of one attack following the other were noticed more and more, and were reported in the medical journals. It was spoken of, thought of, brooded over. The confirmatory cases were all carefully noted; the failures to infect were all ignored, as they always are by people who are looking for contagion. The germ theory has given a great impetus to the idea of contagion. Dr. Loomis actually classifies tuberculosis among miasmatic contagious diseases. Fear will do the rest. In another generation the occasional fact will be a common fact, and in still another, a fixed fact; and the contagiousness of consumption will be enrolled among the concrete errors of the profession. Such has probably been the genesis of all contagious diseases in the remote past.

Fear being recognized as a powerful cause of disease, and a direct and great obstacle to recovery, a wise sanitation will exert itself to prevent or antidote its influences. To eradicate fear is to avert disease, to shorten its duration, diminish its virulence, and promote recovery. How shall we accomplish it? By educating the people up to a higher standard of life. By teaching them a sounder hygiene, a wiser philosophy, a more cheerful theology. By erasing a thousand errors, delusions, and superstitions from their minds, and giving instead the light, the beauty, and the loveliness of truth. There is a mental and moral sanitation ahead of us, which is far more valuable and desirable than all our quarantines, inventions, experimentations, and microscopic search for physical causes.