Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1908 edition. Excerpt: ... SUGGESTION APPLIED WITHOUT HYPNOTISM. It is in functional and neuropathic conditions that suggestive therapeutics is most applicable, yet it must be remembered that a functional disturbance weakens the resistive power of the cells of the organsim and invites bacteriological invasion, and that the speedy and timely correction of the functional disorder may prevent its resulting in an organic lesion. There is an important psychic element in all classes of diseases and conditions, surgical, infectious, febrile, or otherwise. Physicians on the coasts, where yellow fever until only a few years ago wrought great destruction of life, quite frequently reminded me of what an important role mental influences played in helping or hindering a patient suffering with this disease. One physician recited a case in which he had under his care a young man sick with yellow fever, whom he had led to believe himself suffering only from malarial fever, in order to avoid the harmful influence of fear of yellow fever in his case. His family had acquiesced in this scheme and the young man was doing well and no apprehensions were entertained as to his recovery, until a thoughtless friend of the patient who had himself recovered but two weeks before from yellow fever was admitted to see him. He made it dawn on the consciousness of the sufferer that he had yellow fever instead of malarial fever, a severe illness instead of a trivial one, and thus so wrought upon his emotional or involuntary nervous system by the fear that he had planted by his unwise suggestions that the patient at once took a change for the worse. "His stomach and bowels and kindeys literally went to pieces," and he was dead in two hours after the young man's visit. A physician of my acquaintance...