[Footnote 27:  Sadler:  Physiology of Faith and Fear.]

[Footnote 28:  DuBois:  Psychic Treatment of Nervous Disorders.]

=From Real Life.= Startling indeed are the tricks that we can play on ourselves by disregarding these laws.  A patient who was unnecessarily concerned about his stomach once came to me in great alarm, exhibiting a distinct, well-defined swelling about the size of a match-box in the region of his stomach.  I looked at it, laughed, and told him to forget it.  Whereupon it promptly disappeared.  The first segment of the rectus muscle had tied itself up into a knot, under the stimulus of anxious attention.

Another patient appeared at my door one day saying, “Look here!” Examination showed that her abdomen was swollen to the size of more than a six-months pregnancy.  As it happened, this woman had a friend who a short time before had developed a pseudo, or hysterical pregnancy which continued for several months.  My patient, accepting the suggestion, was prepared to imitate her.  I gave her a punch or two and told her to go and dress for luncheon.  In the afternoon she had returned to her normal size.

Another woman, suffering from chronic constipation, was firmly convinced that her bowels could not move without a cathartic, which I refused to give.  However, I did give her some strychnine pills, carefully explaining that they were not for her intestines and that they would have no effect there.  She did not believe me, and promptly began to have an evacuation every day.  It seems that sometimes two wrong ideas are equal to a right one.

If doctors fully realized the power of suggestion, they would be more careful than they sometimes are about suggesting symptoms by the questions they ask their patients.

A patient of mine with locomotor-ataxia suffered from the usual train of symptoms incident to that disease.  It turned out, however, that many of the symptoms had been suggested by the questions of former physicians who had asked him whether he had certain symptoms and certain disabilities.  The patient had answered in the negative and then promptly developed the suggested symptoms.  When I told him what had happened, these false symptoms disappeared leaving only those which had a real physical foundation.

Another patient, a young girl, complained of a definite localized pain in her arm, and told me that she was suffering from angina pectoris.  As we do not expect to find this disease in a young person, I asked her where she got such an idea.  “Dr. ——­ told me so last May.”  “Did you feel the pain in this same place before that time?” I asked.  She thought a minute and then answered:  “Why no, I had a pain around my heart but I did not notice it in my arm until after that consultation.”  The wise physician lets his patients describe their own symptoms without suggesting others by the implication of his questions.