On Physical Disease from Mental Strain

Extract

In an address I had the honour to deliver before the St. Andrew's Medical Graduates Association in November last, I took the opportunity briefly to direct the attention of those practitioners of medicine who are not specially engaged in the treatment of the insane, to the great importance of recognizing the influence of mental action on physical disease. I ventured to press the fact that the most scientific physicians have fallen into the error of studying, with too exclusive a care, the observable conditions of the body, healthy or diseased, and those agents or agencies for curing diseases which produce the most obvious effects—such as knives and other instruments, anæsthetic vapours, active drugs, heat and cold, electrical shocks, and the like. I admitted that as the pure physical existence is the groundwork and the primary necessity of the highest form of living thinking thing, it is by nature the first duty of the healer to make that corporeal frame pure and whole, but I insisted that it is equally his duty to study what shall enter by the senses or windows of the mind, and though invisibly entering, be potent forces for evil or for good. Because an agency is not visible, not tangible, is it, I asked, less real? If a man lose his mind by the failure of his blood, that, it is said, is plain to understand, for it is physical; but if some horror come upon the man through his mind, so that, like poor Horatio, he is be-chilled

“Almost to jelly by the act of fear, Stands dumb, and speaks not,”

is not that, too, physical?—an action direct of mind on matter, reversing the physics of the body, and creating disease? It must be so; and in the study of this action, from the universe into the man, there lies, I maintained, a world almost unknown.