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.,

CHAPTEE XVII.  PSYCHO- THERAPEUTICS. PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF THE INFLUENCE OF THE MIND ON THE BODY TO MEDICAL PRACTICE.
SECTION V. — Combined Influence of Arousing" certain Mental States, and lightly touching the Affected Part.

" All these cases turned out so happily, it may be imagined that they are selected. I declare, however, that they are the first that occur in the Minute Book ; and if I could imagine it necessary to add more, there are several remaining equally successful."

 Dr. Haygarth gives the following :

" Benjamin Quarman, who had received but little benefit from medicine, was obliged for some time to hobble upon crutches with much difficulty and in great pain. He attributed his illness to a violent cold, caught by working in the mud on a pair of dock-gates. I must add, however, that he had been all his life a plumber, which contributes, perhaps, not a little to his indisposition.

Upon the first application of the tractors (which were formed from a piece of bone) to his thigh, he experienced a pricking sensation ; in a few minutes he could hardly persuade himself that they did not cut him ; at the end of the operation he could use his limbs more freely, but complained that I had driven the pain into his knee.

He was under the care of Dr. Moncrieffe, who was present when Mr. Lax relieved him, in a few minutes, of a pain which had been for some time fixed in the shoulder-blade. This man recovered considerably the use of his lower extremities, and was able to comb his hair easily, which the stiffness and pain in his shoulder had heretofore prevented him from doing "

(Of the Imagination as a Cause and as a Cure of Diseases of the Body, exemplified by fictitious Tractors and Epidemic Convulsions. By Dr. Haygarth).