Dr. F. W. Southworth says: “Fear is itself a contagious disease and is sometimes reflected from one mind to another with great rapidity. It passes from one to another, from the healthy to the ill, from doctor or nurse to patient, from mother to child, and so on. The greatest fears we can usually get away from, but it is the little fears and anxieties, constant apprehension, fears of imagined evils of all sorts which prey upon our vitality and lessen our powers, thus rendering us more susceptible to disease. To avert disease, then, we must eradicate fear; but how shall we accomplish it? Through wise education—educating the people to a higher standard of living; by teaching a sounder hygiene; a wiser philosophy and a more cheerful theology. By erasing a thousand errors and superstitions from fearful minds and pointing them to the light, beauty and loveliness of the truth. This mental and moral sanitation is still ahead of us, but it is more valuable and desirable than all quarantines, inventions, experiments, and microscopical researches after physical or material causes.”
Sir George Paget, M. D., says: “In many cases I have seen reasons for believing that cancer has had its origin in prolonged anxiety.” Dr. Murchison says: “I have been surprised to find how often patients with primary cancer of the liver have traced the cause of this illness to protracted grief and anxiety. These cases have been far too numerous to be accounted for as merely coincidents.” Sir B. W. Richardson, M. D., says: “Eruptions of the skin frequently follow excessive mental strain. In all these, as well as in cancer, epilepsy and mania, the cause is frequently partly or wholly mental. It is remarkable how little the question of the origin of physical disease from mental influences has been studied.” Prof. Elmer Gates says: “My experiments show that irascible, malevolent and depressing emotions generate in the system injurious compounds, some of which are extremely poisonous. Also that agreeable, happy emotions generate chemical compounds of nutritious value which stimulate the cells to manufacture energy.”
Dr. Patton, in the address before the Wabasha County Medical Society, above mentioned, gives the following interesting case of the effect of faith and expectant attention, or Suggestion: He said: “While surgeon of a Cincinnati hospital one of the messenger boys was often disobedient of orders. The sister superior once asked me how to punish him. I suggested putting him to bed and making him sick with medicine. My advice was acted upon with alacrity. A tea-spoonful of colored water was given him every fifteen minutes. With assumed gravity, I ordered the nurse, in the boy’s presence, to keep giving the medicine until he became sick and vomited. Within an hour he vomited profusely.... A funny incident illustrative of the faith and confidence sometimes reposed in the medical man and his power in curing disease, happened in my first year of practice. An Irish laborer, much given to profanity, came to my office, with a cold on his chest. I prescribed a soothing mixture and a liniment of camphor, ammonia and soap. A few days later, meeting him on the street, I asked him if the medicine had cured him all right. He replied with enthusiasm, ‘Oh! yes, yes, it acted most beautifully and cured me pretty d—— d quick, but it was awful hot stuff, for it burned in my throat like hell-fire itself.’ I knew at once, but did not tell him, that he had been swallowing the liniment of camphor, hartshorn and soap, and rubbing the cough mixture on the outside. His faith was even stronger than the liniment, and cured him in spite of the blunder.
“Perhaps the most wonderful confirmation came under my observation while wintering in San Antonio, Texas, in 1880. Some nostrum fakirs with a retinue of fourteen musicians and comedians came to this city in an immense chariot, drawn by eight gaily caparisoned horses. Every evening they came upon the military plaza to sell their panacea. I went over one evening out of curiosity, being attracted by the songs and music. The head fakir was shouting to an immense crowd about the virtues of his specific. He claimed that it contained thirteen ingredients, gathered at a great expense from all quarters of the globe, and would cure all the ills that flesh was heir to. Cures were warranted in every case, or the money refunded on the following evening. After this harangue, he said that the medicine was for sale at $1 per bottle, until 300 bottles had been sold, as it was an invariable rule to sell only that number on any one evening. Immediately a frenzied mob rushed pell-mell to the end of the chariot, each one holding aloft a silver dollar. He had previously announced that no change would be made, and that every one to get the medicine should have a dollar ready in his hand. In half an hour 300 bottles had been sold, the empty trunk closed with a bang, and the statement made that no more could be had until the following evening, although there was yet a great multitude clamoring for more. Curiosity again led me to the plaza the next evening, and I went early. The initial performance was a free tooth-pulling, to last thirty minutes. He said he was the kingpin of the tooth-pullers, and I believe he was. The rapidity of his work was a marvel. He snatched from various jaws about 250 teeth, including the good ones, within the limit, throwing them from his forceps right and left among his audience. Those operated upon were wrought to such a frenzy of excitement and wonder that each one, without an exception, declared that no pain whatever had been experienced. A call was then made for the 300 who had bought medicine on the previous evening to mount the chariot and tell what the medicine had done for them.
“From every quarter men and women, both white and colored, pressed forward to give their experience. Their stories were grotesque and curious enough, but no matter what their ailments, cures had resulted in every case. At the end of half an hour, while the experience meeting was at its acme, the fakir abruptly closed it, saying, in a regretful voice, that the rest would have to wait until the next evening to tell of their cures, as he now wanted those to come forward who had not been cured by the medicine bought on the previous evening. He stood in silence with folded arms for three minutes. No one having come forward, the voice of this arrant charlatan rang out in stentorian tones, ‘All, all have been cured! We have cured everyone!’ Then another 300 bottles were sold in a jiffy, I myself being one of the fortunate purchasers. The chief of this outfit stopped in the hotel where I was. After dinner the next day, I made his acquaintance in the smoking room, saying I was a doctor, too; that I had attended two of his soirees, bought his medicine and was greatly interested in it. I surprised him by the statement that his medicine was made by M. & Co., wholesale druggists of Cincinnati, and that it was fluid extract of podophyllin. He stared for some moments, but made no reply. I continued, ‘I know M.’s fluid extract, as his process of its manufacture is peculiar, and differs from other manufacturers in this, that he exhausts the root by percolation with alcohol, ether and glycerine, giving the product a sweetish taste and a slight ethereal odor.’ The man asked if I was also a chemist. I replied, ‘Yes, I once lectured in a medical college in Cincinnati on drugs and their uses, and I can readily tell fluid extracts by their taste, odor and physical characteristics.’
“After some hesitation, he said, ‘Yes, this is M.’s podophyllin and nothing else.’ I inquired if he attributed all his success to the medicine. He answered, ‘No, for once in Missouri the mandrake ran out before a new lot arrived. We found something like it in a drug store of the town, and the people got well just the same. If the people believe you can cure them, and have faith in your medicine, they get well anyway, or they think they do, which is the same thing.’ The fakirs remained one week, sold 2,100 bottles, and presumably cured 2,100 people, as no one came forward to reclaim his dollar for the medicine, which was contained in a two-drachm vial of 120 drops. A dose was one drop after each meal in one spoonful of water.
“When I was in California recently a friend mentioned that an intelligent relative of his was being treated by a celebrated Chinese doctor. The relative claimed that Chinese physicians were better than our own; that they had devoted 5,000 years to medicine and had thus become so learned and skillful that they could tell all diseases without asking a single question, simply by feeling the pulse. Out of curiosity I visited this physician, ostensibly as a patient. Without so declaring myself, he knew intuitively that I came to consult him. Without asking any questions he placed his finger upon my right wrist, communed with himself for a few moments, and then gravely informed me that I had thirty-seven diseases; some in the blood, some in the brain, some in the kidneys, some in the liver, and many others in the heart and lungs. He said it would take sixteen different herbs to cure me. He volunteered the statement that he could detect 6,000 diseases by the pulse alone, and that he used 400 herbs in the treatment of the various diseases. Upon his request, I examined his portfolio containing 350 testimonials of marvellous cures, wrought upon American residents of California during his seventeen years’ practice on the coast. Many of them were from parties of intelligence and eminence, and were so extraordinary that nothing short of their being attested by numerous witnesses of unimpeachable veracity, could satisfy one of their truth. Now, permit me to say that I have no pulse in the right wrist, the pulse being congenitally absent; but through it he made the pretense of locating so many diseases. This doubtless is the form and character of medical practice in China among the native Chinamen, and probably has been for many centuries among a population of 400,000,000. Is not the logic from the above facts irresistible, that in China the native physician cannot tell one disease from another, and that all his work is simply nonsense and guess work? There can be no escape from this conclusion—it follows as lucidly as a demonstrated problem in Euclid—that any benefit that may ever accrue from their treatment is wholly due to the dynamic force of the brain upon the functions of the body.”
The following, from a Philadelphia journal, gives a striking illustration of the fact that the imagination is a real factor in many cases of physical ailment: “The fact that the throes of the imagination under great nervous excitement often produce a corresponding physical frenzy was illustrated recently in the case of a man who had gone to sleep with his artificial teeth in his mouth. Waking suddenly with a choking sensation, he found his teeth had disappeared. He looked in the glass of water where they were usually deposited, did not see them and realized they must be far down his throat. Choking and struggling, he hammered on the door of a friend sleeping in the house, who, seeing his critical condition, vainly tried to draw the teeth out of the sufferer’s throat. He could feel the teeth, but had not the strength to extract them. He ran for a blacksmith who lived a few doors away, but the blacksmith’s hand was too big to put into the man’s mouth. A doctor had been sent for, but he was so long in coming that the victim of the accident seemed likely to die of suffocation before the physician arrived. A little girl of ten years was brought under the impression that her small hand might reach the obstacle and withdraw it, but she got frightened and began to cry. The sufferer became black in the face, his throat swelled out, and his friends expected every moment to be his last, when finally the doctor arrived. He heard the history of the case, saw that the teeth were not in the man’s jaws nor in their nightly receptacle, felt the throat and cast his eyes seriously upon the floor. There, on the floor, he saw the whole set of teeth. He adjusted them to the jaws of the patient, told him to breathe freely, and every symptom of suffocation disappeared.”
The following from an Eastern journal illustrates another phase of the subject: “Saltpetriere, the hospital for nervous diseases, made famous by the investigations of Dr. Charcot, has an interesting case of religious mania. The patient, who is a woman of about forty years of age, entertains the belief that she is crucified, and this delusion has caused a contraction of the muscles of the feet of such a nature that she can walk only on tip-toe. The patient, moreover, is subject occasionally to the still more extraordinary manifestation—that of ‘stigmata.’ Instances of ‘stigmata’ are tolerably frequent in the ‘Lives of the Saints’ of alleged supernatural marks on the body in imitation of the wounds of Christ. These ‘stigmata’ have been observed beyond all question on the woman at the Saltpetriere. Their appearance on the body coincides with the return of the most solemn religious anniversaries. These ‘stigmata’ are so visible that it has been possible to photograph them. The doctors of the Saltpetriere in order to assure themselves that these manifestations were not the result of trickery, contrived a sort of shade having a glass front and metal sides, and capable of being hermetically attached to the body by means of India rubber fixings. These shades were placed in position a considerable time before the dates at which the stigmata are wont to appear. When they were affixed there were no marks whatever on the patient’s body, but at the expected period the ‘stigmata’ were visible as usual through the glass.”
In a Southern journal there is reported an interesting case, in which a New Orleans physician tells the following story: “A nervous man recently called on me and asked, ‘In what part of the abdomen are the premonitory pains of appendicitis felt?’ On the left side, exactly here,’ I replied, indicating a spot a little above the point of the hip-bone. He went out, and next afternoon I was summoned in hot haste to the St. Charles hotel. I found the planter writhing on his bed, his forehead beaded with sweat, and his whole appearance indicating intense suffering. ‘I have an attack of appendicitis,’ he groaned, ‘and I’m a dead man! I’ll never survive an operation!’ ‘Where do you feel the pain?’ I asked. ‘Oh, right here,’ he replied, putting his finger on the spot I had located at the office. ‘I feel as if somebody had a knife in me turning it around.’ ‘Well, then, it isn’t appendicitis, at any rate,’ I said cheerfully, ‘because it is the wrong side.’ ‘The wrong side!’ he exclaimed, glaring at me indignantly. ‘Why, you told me yourself it was on the left side!’ ‘Then I must have been abstracted,’ I replied calmly; ‘I should have said the right side.’ I prescribed something that wouldn’t hurt him, and learned afterward that he ate his dinner in the dining-room the same evening. Oh! yes; he was no doubt in real pain when I called, but you can make your finger ache merely by concentrating your attention on it for a few moments.”