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Dr J C Barker  MD, MRCP, DPM – Scared to Death – An examination of fear, its cause and effects

Quoting a cutting from the News Chronicle describing a doctor’s case book

It was in 1944 in Burma. I walked with Captain Chaudhuri to the M.I. room and sat beside him as the patients filed in. He never left his chair and never looked up. Scarcely a word was said. As each patient stood to attention in front of the desk, Captain Chaudhuri muttered something, made a note and gave some instruction to the Indian corporal at his elbow.

I was mystified but kept quiet until the end of the performance which was soon over. The whole parade would have taken me two hours at least; he had finished it in twenty minutes.

As we strolled back to the mess I asked him what he had done for these patients. 'Enough,' he replied cryptically, and then went on to talk at length of the futility of Western medicine.

An hour later, along a forest track, we came upon a knot of men round one lying on the ground. He had been stung by a scorpion and his leg was very swollen. He seemed to be in much pain.

Captain Chaudhuri . . . produced a stub of red crayon from the pocket of his bush shirt.  With this he drew a ring round the puncture mark on the man's leg, and stepped back to light a cigarette. Before the cigarette was finished, the man was up, apparently out of pain. The swelling vividly diminished.

Not a word had passed between doctor and patient.

Shortly after that . . . Chaudhuri was posted away, so he never finished telling me how he did it. Yoga came into it . . . In his opinion my Western training had made it impossible for me to understand what he did. He was probably right.