groan, blush, tremble, sweat, at such things as are suggested unto them by their imagination.  Avicenna speaks of one that could cast himself into a palsy when he list; and some can imitate the tunes of birds and beasts that they can hardly be discerned:  Dagebertus’ and Saint Francis’ scars and wounds, like those of Christ’s (if at the least any such were), [1612]Agrippa supposeth to have happened by force of imagination:  that some are turned to wolves, from men to women, and women again to men (which is constantly believed) to the same imagination; or from men to asses, dogs, or any other shapes. [1613]Wierus ascribes all those famous transformations to imagination; that in hydrophobia they seem to see the picture of a dog, still in their water, [1614]that melancholy men and sick men conceive so many fantastical visions, apparitions to themselves, and have such absurd apparitions, as that they are kings, lords, cocks, bears, apes, owls; that they are heavy, light, transparent, great and little, senseless and dead (as shall be showed more at large, in our [1615] sections of symptoms), can be imputed to nought else, but to a corrupt, false, and violent imagination.  It works not in sick and melancholy men only, but even most forcibly sometimes in such as are sound:  it makes them suddenly sick, and [1616]alters their temperature in an instant.  And sometimes a strong conceit or apprehension, as [1617]Valesius proves, will take away diseases:  in both kinds it will produce real effects.  Men, if they see but another man tremble, giddy or sick of some fearful disease, their apprehension and fear is so strong in this kind, that they will have the same disease.  Or if by some soothsayer, wiseman, fortune-teller, or physician, they be told they shall have such a disease, they will so seriously apprehend it, that they will instantly labour of it.  A thing familiar in China (saith Riccius the Jesuit), [1618]"If it be told them they shall be sick on such a day, when that day comes they will surely be sick, and will be so terribly afflicted, that sometimes they die upon it.”  Dr. Cotta in his discovery of ignorant practitioners of physic, cap. 8, hath two strange stories to this purpose, what fancy is able to do.  The one of a parson’s wife in Northamptonshire, An. 1607, that coming to a physician, and told by him that she was troubled with the sciatica, as he conjectured (a disease she was free from), the same night after her return, upon his words, fell into a grievous fit of a sciatica:  and such another example he hath of another good wife, that was so troubled with the cramp, after the same manner she came by it, because her physician did but name it.  Sometimes death itself is caused by force of phantasy.  I have heard of one that coming by chance in company of him that was thought to be sick of the plague (which was not so) fell down suddenly dead.  Another was sick of the plague with conceit.  One seeing his fellow let blood falls down in a swoon.