Outwitting Our Nerves: A Primer of Psychotherapy

by Josephine A. Jackson; Helen M. Salisbury

It is true that after a "bilious" person has vomited for a few minutes he is likely to throw up a certain

amount of bile, which is supposed to have been lying in his stomach and causing the nausea. In fact, however, this bile is merely a part of the usual supply stored away in the gall-bladder. By the very act of retching, the bile is forced out of the bile channels into the stomach and thence up into the mouth. Anybody can throw up bile at any time if he only tries hard enough.

One of the favorite habits of certain people is the taking of calomel and salts. After such a dose they view with satisfaction the green character of the stools and conclude that they have rid themselves of a great amount of harmful matter. As a matter of fact, the greater part of the coloring in the stools is from the calomel itself, changed in the intestines from one salt of mercury to another. Any excess bile is the result of the irritating action of the calomel on the intestinal wall, an irritation which makes the bowel hurry to cast out this foreign substance without waiting for the bile to be absorbed as usual.

A patient once told me that he had bought medicine from a street fakir and by his direction had followed it with a dose of salts. He saved the bowel movement, washed it in a sieve, and discovered a great number of "gall-stones," which the medicine had so effectively washed from his system. He was much astonished when I told him that his gall-stones were merely pieces

of soap. He did not know that everybody manufactures soap in his body every day, and that by taking an extra quantity of oil in the shape of the fakir's medicine and an extra quantity of potash in the salts, he had merely augmented a normal physiological process. The supposed action of calomel belongs to the same class of phenomena, and has no slightest effect on the liver or on real gall-stones, which are the precipitate of bile-salts in the gall-bladder, and which cannot be reached by any medicine.

If the popular notions about biliousness are ill founded, what then causes the disturbances which undoubtedly do occur and which show themselves in attacks of nausea or sick headache? The answer can be given in a word of four letters; a coated tongue, a bilious attack and a sick headache are all the outcome of a mood. Stocks have gone down or the wife is cranky or the neighbors are hateful. Adrenalin and thyroid secretions are poured out as the result of emotion; digestion is stopped, circulation disturbed, and the whole apparatus thrown out of gear.

Sick-Headache. Sick-headache is primarily a circulatory disturbance; and although the disturbance may have been inaugurated by some chemical unbalance, the sum total of the force that makes a sick-headache is emotional. The emotion, of course, need not be conscious in order to be effective. If we picture the

arteries all over the body as being supplied with, among other things, a wall of circular muscles, and then imagine messages of emotion being flashed to the nerves controlling this muscle wall, we may get an idea of what happens just before a sick-headache. Some parts of the arteries contract too much and other parts relax. The arteries to the head tighten up at the extremities and become loose lower down. The force of the blood-stream against the constricted portion can hardly fail to cause pain. The sick part of the headache is merely a sympathetic strike of the nerves which control circulation and stomach.

The moral of all this is plain. If a sick-headache is the result of an emotional spasm of the blood-vessels, the obvious cure is a change of the emotion. Some people manage it by going to a party or a picnic, others by ignoring the symptoms and keeping on with their work. A woman physician whom I know was in the midst of a violent headache when called out on an obstetrical case. She felt sorry for herself, but went on the case. In the strenuous work which followed, she quite forgot the headache, which disappeared as if by magic.

Sometimes it happens that a headache recurs periodically or at regular intervals. It is easy to see that in such cases the exciting cause is fear and expectation. At some time in the past, headaches have occurred at