RED HAIR AND ILLNESS

Press, Volume C, Issue 29515, 17 May 1961, Page 17

RED HAIR AND ILLNESS

Dunedin Doctor’s Theory

A tendency to migraine, asthma, tachycardia, hypertension. flbrositis, anxiety neurosis, hysteria, claustrophobia. marital difficulties, alcoholism, delinquency, or accident proneness may be a result of mixing with redheaded people, according to Dr. B. R. Hay, of Dunedin. If the red-headed person has lost a limb, then the effect is so much the stronger, Dr. Hay adds. Red-headed persons can also affect themselves in this way. In a letter to the editor of the “New Zealand Medical Journal," Dr. Hay pleads for “tolerant consideration of the possibility,” which had impressed him recently, he says. The tendency to neuroses and psychosomatic and behaviour disorders such as he lists is "predisposed to by continued contact with redheaded persons in early childhood,” and the conditions are “triggered off by social contact with redheaded people in later life," he thinks. “If readers feel from their experience that I may not be altogether deluding myself in these observations, their comments would be personally comforting, even if discomforting to find auch a potent and common ‘RH.’ factor at work.”