Show MIND AND BODY The IMiyslcal Man Affected I by Mental Men-tal Conditions IDr J Kitchen in Halmenmimian Monthly When worried and vexed the common saying of the Prcl > te is that they are out I of sorts and John Hunter said there is I not a natural action in the body vohm tary or involuntary that may not be in fluenced by the peculiar state of the mind at the time It is well known that he in an excited controversy with one of > his hospital colleagues > fell dead in one of the wards Jaundice has been brought on by care and anxiety Cases have been recorded of st dents suffering by this affliction arising from anxiety and fear before an examination before the censors board of I the Royal T College of Physicians If care I will kill a cat though it have nine lives 1 1 o j v AW h t c nine llVCS and if too much care will makeavoun man gray and turn an old man to clav it may be certain the violent emotions and missions will effect the system more last ngly and disastrously John Hunter notecHhat the hen in the raising of her mspring kept her body lean and meagre but if her chickens were taken from her she soon got fat Substitute in these cases the worry and anxieties of business and everydaylife troubles and the pic ture is unmistakable Fear and care are also noticeable in their actions on the skin and hair Medical histories can show many a Prisoner of Chillon so well described by Byron which is no fanciful case In times of peril and threats of invasion in-vasion numerous cases of a sudden change of the color of the hair have been recorded Dr Laycock mentions a case of severe neuralgia occurring at night from fright and found in the morning that the inner portion of the eyebrow and eyelashes had become white he also asserts that the natural grayness of old age is connected with certain changes in the nerve centers An English physician says that lectures lec-tures delivered to medical students frequently quently produce unusual mental stimuli upon their bodily feelings and in some cases specific diseases have not only been simulated but actually induced diseased symptoms A fellow student after hearing hear-ing a description of what is usually called the Scotch fiddle itch was influenced that a persistent itching was felt between his fingers the result of the morbid mental men-tal influences to which he had been subjected sub-jected Students often fancy that they have the very diseases which they hear described by their teachers and the heart generally comes in for its full share and it is almost impossible to persuade them otherwise If it is found that the influence of the mind and its imaginings may induce diseases it is no less certain that a like action in some cases cure dis easer Fright especially has made its cures in gouty and rheumatic invalids Ve all know the effect of going to have a tooth extracted the pain ceasing on entering tering the operating room The faith cure may come in here in chronic cases the mind exercising its will power Luther taught that if a man had faith he could accomplish anything even commit any kind of sin without guilt The charming away of chills and fevers and of warts seems to come under this category I have come across several cases of this kind Old women often possess this faculty Even in the time of Lucian such female practitioners were successful in such cases A surgeons daughter had about a dozen on her hands the usual modes of treatment having availed nothing for their removal For eighteen months they remained intractable intracta-ble until a gentleman noticing the disfig I rement asked to count them Carefully and solemnly noting down their number he then said You will not be troubled with your warts after next Sunday At the time named they had disappeared Now here the connection between the imagination of some occult and mysterious mysteri-ous power and the cure was too close to leave a doubt that as in other cases of bodily ailment the mind which so frequently uently affects the body to its hurt had in turn favorably influenced the physical organization No less a personage than Lord Bacon himself had a similar cure performed upon his hands by the English ambassadors ambassa-dors lady at Paris who he adds was a woman far from superstitious The ladys procedure certainly betokened a belief in some influences for Bacon tells us that taking a piece of lard with the skin on she rubbed the warts all over with tIle fat side and among the growths so treated was one he had had since childhood child-hood Then she nailed the piece of lard with the fat side toward the sun upon a post of her chamber window which looked toward the south In the course of five weeks all the warts disappeared and that great wart which he had so long endured for company The miscellaneous laneous substances used in wart charms and incantations of like nature at once reveal the fact of the real cure lying in some direction other than that of the nostrum beneath the material substance unconsciously used as a mere bait for the imagination the forces of mind operate through the medium of the nervous impression im-pression 1 u Some ten or twelve years ago mere appeared ap-peared in Philadelphia a Dr Newton a celebrated animal magnetist he made the blind to see and the deaf to hear the rheumatic and the gouty came on crutches and walked away without them I went whose hands were full man with a young of warts unrelieved by medicine Newton New-ton blew on them and made several with his hands and told him that passes weeks there would not be a soli three in left this proved so for within tary one In that time they had all disappeared and rheumatic cases the above eye ear frequent and many say almost there were constant relapses but the relief most Newtons magnetic influence afforded by I was certainly over many of his patients very wonderful |