DISEASES BY SUGGESTION.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXIX, Issue 3769, 30 July 1907, Page 4

DISEASES BY SUGGESTION.

An eminent Scots doctor is fixedly of the opinion that sickness is frequently caused by imagination. The mere thought of a sickness or an infirmity, he says, is often sufficient to cause distress similar to that arising from the ailment itself. An instance of this was furnished by a man who was present at an operation upon his brother. The patient’s leg required forcible straightening, and at the crunching sound attending the operation the brother looking on experienced a sharp pain in the leg, and was not able to rid himself of it for more than a year ; while the man who had undergone the operation under the influence of ether felt no pain at all, either at the time of the operation or afterwards. Even when the imagination is purposely aroused bj T , say, an author, he may, while writing a description of an ailment, become so deeply absorbed that the reins of reason are slipped, and, presto! the whole range of symptoms of that particular disease are forthwith felt by him. It is said that this actually occurred to Flaubert when he was waiting his novel “ Madame Rovary.” While depicting wdth technical accuracy the suicide of the heroine by arsenic, the author suffered all the symptoms of arsenious poisoning. Since auto-suggestion can cause disease, so suggestion can also heal. A physician prescribed harmless bread and sugar pills for an insane woman w r ho suffered from insomnia. They produced thedesired effect; but several days later the patient, believing the pills to contain morphia, swallowed the entire boxful with suicidal intent. The result was in every respect like that produced by morphine poisoning, and the coma into which the woman fell was so profound that it w r as wdth the utmost difficulty that her life was saved.