Observations placeholder

As described in Illustrations Of The Influence Of The Mind Upon The Body In Health And Disease, Designed To Elucidate The Action Of The Imagination - Daniel Hack Tuke, M.D., M.R.C.P.,

CHAPTER XVI. INFLUENCE OF MENTAL STATES UPON DISORDERS OF SENSATION, MOTION, AND THE ORGANIC FUNCTIONS.
SECTION III. — Influence of Mental States upon Disorders involving- the Involuntary Muscles and the Organic Functions.

Constipation. — In the " Bibliotheque choisie de Medecine," tome vi, p. 84, is a good example of the effect produced by the Imagination, during sleep, upon the action of the intestines. The daughter of the Hanoverian Consul, aged 18, having to take a rhubarb purge on the following day, which she especially disliked, dreamed that she had taken the hated dose. Griped by her imaginary rhubarb she awoke, and the bowels acted freely five or six times.

Precisely similar is a case which I give on the same authority (Demangeon) ; that of a monk for whom some purgative had been prepared, to be taken on the following day. He dreamed that he swallowed the medicine ; the consequence of which was that he was aroused by the necessity of attending to the calls of nature, and was copiously purged eight times (De 1 'Imagination. By J. B. Demangeon. 1829., p. 149).

All must admit that any medical man who would engage to insure the same operations from imaginary as from real rhubarb or senna, would enjoy a fashionable purgative practice.

CHAPTEE XVII.  PSYCHO- THERAPEUTICS. PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF THE INFLUENCE OF THE MIND ON THE BODY TO MEDICAL PRACTICE.
SECTION IV. — Systematic Direction of the Attention to a Particular Region of the Body.

A gentleman, somewhat, required a daily aperient, being costive from sedentary pursuits. When medicine lost its effect, he applied to a medical man for advice, who, seating his patient before him, with the abdomen uncovered, requested him to direct his attention exclusively to the sensations he experienced in that region, acting upon his Expectation, by assuring him that the desired action of the bowels would be secured, and pointing with his finger along the course of the arch of the colon and small intestines, so that his current of thought might pursue that direction. The experiment very shortly succeeded, "and for some time after, the bowels continued to act freely without medicine." It may be added in illustration of the same principle, though the case was not therapeutic in its character, that a lecturer was put to great inconvenience on one occasion by the threatened action of the bowels during the lecture.

His Will triumphed ; but ever afterwards he was troubled in the same way when he went to the same lecture-room, whatever precaution he might take, but not when he lectured elsewhere (Human Physiology. By Dr. Carpenter. 4th Edit. 1853, p. 953).