Imaginary Ailments

New Zealand Tablet, 13 September 1906, Page 23

Imaginary Ailments

Apropos of the measure now before Parliament for the suppression of quackery, a story is going the rounds of the press that a French surgeon treated a poor woman who was convinced that she had had a lizard in her inside for forty years by an imaginary operation followed by exhibition of a lizard obtained for. the purpose. 'A like device (remarks the ' British Medical Journal,' -^commenting on the case) has often, been successfully practised in similar circum-' stances. To show the length to. - which imagination j may carry "a neurotic person, we may mention v the .' case of a great lady who had _ari. ineradicable persuasion that all kinds of foreign bodies'found their way into the throat and stuck there. -Nothing was - ever to be seen, but she was not- to* be" satisfied with the_ most solemn assurance to that effect^ So she went, spluttering and choking, especially when she went oujt to dinner, ~ till life became -a burden to her and -to -those about her. At last - she found a physician who relieved-her suffering. As he has long since gone to a place where he sleeps unvexed by the imaginings of hysterical patients, there can be no harm in telling how he did this. The method was simplic- . ity- itself. He laid in a stock of small coins, frag-

ments of bone, feathers, small tangles of hair, pieces of. wax, arid the; like unconsidered trifles, an-d triumphantly removed one or other of these objects -as the ..occasion required.' This may be condemned by the righteous as quackery, and quackery of a kind it undoubtedly was. But - if . the real end medicine is to cure, cair she, when legitimate means fail,- afford- to - despise -anything that .relieves suffering, even though the suffering Be? -imaginary ? Or ,must all- such sufferers be allowed to drift into the net of the, qyack ' who applies his imaginary remedies not for their benefit, but for his own?' ' -