Observations placeholder
Curing menstrual constipation
Identifier
022290
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Music as cause and cure of illness – Dr Cheryce Kramer
Both Lichtenthal and Schneider agreed that soul states could be modified and adjusted through music. Schneider cited as evidence the case of a woman whom he had personally cured of menstrual constipation. I shall quote the passage in full because it is such a vivid portrayal of asylum-based music therapy, blending together one patient's subjective reactions and the modulations of the music itself:
From E Volkel - Spekulative musiktherapie
She sat there mute, mute as a fish, and without motion. Then I began to play my fantasy in a pitch appropriate to the spiritual tone of one sunk deep in melancholy, E-flat. Quietly, then crescendo-ing into the strongest fortissimo and from there to a moderate piano; emphatic at times, at times restrained, prolonging the chord and then continuing through the full range of harmonic changes and variations. After the third crescendo ... the patient exhaled a deep sigh. But still she remained mute and otherwise still.
I preludized on G-sharp and gave the key-note for the chorus to begin. Its first words could still be heard, swelling, then leading to a murmur and back. They had not as yet subsided and one could hear the leading tenor clearly, discernibly and quietly supported by the choir - when suddenly the patient cried out: 'O! Antonio, Antonio!' [the tenor's name]. Thereupon she cried so much that the singing had to desist. The unhappy patient, deeply shaken, had to be brought to bed. Once her room was illuminated we made the pleasing discovery that with the utterance of 'Oh! Antonio, Antonio!' her flow of monthly bleeding had been released: and it had thickly, very thickly covered the entire floor.
This scene of musical healing is curiously reminiscent of Bogs's musical experience, except that, instead of death from Romantic overstimulation, the patient's menstrual fluids are released by the strains of curative music. Schneider notes that within less than a year the patient had been entirely restored.