In his ward at the Hôpital Andral, in Paris, Dr. Mathieu had a large number of tubercular patients. One morning, while making his rounds, he lingered before one of them and remarked to the house physician and the students who were with him:
That there had just been discovered in Germany a specific for tuberculosis—namely, "antiphymose." Next day he again spoke of this antiphymose, and, in the hearing of the patients, as before, told of the wonderful results it yielded when employed in the treatment of tuberculosis. For a week the patients talked of nothing but that wonderful antiphymose; they couldn't understand why "the chief" didn't try the new drug.
Their wishes were at last acceded to, and the experiments with antiphymose, which Dr. Mathieu said he had obtained from Germany, began. To judge of the action of that drug, which was injected under the skin, it was determined that the house-physician himself should take the temperature and register the weight of the consumptives under treatment.
This was done, and soon it seemed evident that a powerful and highly beneficent medicine was at work. Under the influence of this new remedy, the patients' fever subsided and their weight increased. Some gained a kilogramme and a half, some two, and some even three kilogrammes. Meanwhile the cough ceased, and those who had been unable to touch food began to eat; those who had been unable to sleep now slept all night. And if, to complete the test, the injections of antiphymose were stopped, the fever returned and all the old symptoms reasserted themselves. The victims grew thin.
Now this famous antiphymose, this marvellous drug procured from Germany, was nothing but water, ordinary water, but sterilized in Dr. Mathieu's laboratory! All that talk before the patients about the discovery and therapeutic virtue of antiphymose, all those little bluffs involved in the house-physician's taking the temperature and the weight of the patients, were simply a mise-en-scène designed to create a sort of suggestion and to reënforce it as much as possible. And it was manifestly suggestion, and not the injections of pure water, that checked the fever, arrested the cough, diminished the expectoration, revived the appetite, and increased the weight.[72:1]
A simple experiment, with a view to proving that a patient is accessible to auto-suggestion, is described by Professor Münsterberg. Some interesting-looking apparatus, with a few metal rings, is fastened upon his fingers, and connected with a battery and electric keys. The key is then pushed down in view of the patient, who is instructed to indicate the exact time when he begins to feel the electric current. The sensation will probably shortly be felt in one of his fingers; whereupon the physician can demonstrate to him that there was no connection in the wires, and that the whole galvanic sensation was the result of suggestion.[72:2]
Joseph Jastrow, in "Fact and Fable in Psychology," remarks that the modern forms of irregular healing present apt illustrations of occult methods of treatment which were in vogue long ago. And chief among these is the mental factor, whether utilized when the patient is awake or when he is unconscious, as a curative principle. The legitimate recognition of the importance of mental conditions and influences in therapeutics is one of the results of the union of modern psychology and medicine.
FOOTNOTES:
[53:1] Thomas Jay Hudson, The Law of Psychic Phenomena, p. 23.