Psychotherapy : an eclectic approach / Sol L. Garfield.

  • Sol L. Garfield
Date:
[1980]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Psychotherapy : an eclectic approach / Sol L. Garfield. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    In other examples, where the symptoms are due to mental oppression, he pursued a course of treatment that was of soothing nature. A distinguished pro- fessor of physic at Bologna happened to discover that his pulse was intermittent, and being extremely anxious about it was incessantly feeling his pulse, to discover that the evil was daily increasing. Morgagni's advice to his patient was to take his finger off his wrist and not to inquire too anxiously about his condition. The advice was followed, and the result was a complete removal of the disturbance. It is a very singular truth that in describing the action of the nervous system on the circulation Morgagni shows that he was cognizant of the fact that the circulation may be disturbed by two sets of nervous irritations, one inflicted through the pneumogastrics, the other through those nerves which are sub- servient to the arteries—the vaso-motor system which is readily disturbed by the mind. In one patient he observed great perturbations of the pulse in both wrists as the result of mental anxiety. But a day or two later the pulse derange- ment was confined to the left side altogether. The pulse of the right arm was quite regular, while that of the left arm still showed the inequality. When the mental distress was relieved, this pulse also became equal. Morgagni cites Sydenham's contemporary, Lancisi, the great Italian physi- cian, as recognizing the influence of the emotions on the heart. Examples of similar convictions as to mental influence in medicine are also found in the works of Morgagni's great contemporaries, Boerhaave and Van Swieten, and the great physicians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were closely imitated in their recognition of the value of the influence of mind over body in medicine by their successors in the profession. John Hunter.—Wise old John Hunter recognized the influence of the mind on the body very clearly. He said, for instance, There is not a natural action in the body, whether voluntary or involuntary, that may not be influ- enced by the peculiar state of mind at the time. He lays it down as a law that every part of the body sympathizes with the mind, for whatever affects the mind, the body is affected in proportion. He said further, as a state of the mind is capable of producing a disease, another state of it may affect a cure. He called attention to the fact that the touch of a corpse produced wonderful effects upon the minds of patients. He said, Even tumors have yielded to the stroke of a dead man's hand. He observes that while we should naturally expect that diseases connected with the nerves—and those in which their alteration is in the action of parts not in their structure— would be most affected by the imagination, we find that there are other diseases in which they appear to have little connection that are much affected by the state of mind. German Mind Healing. —In his monograph on Psychotherapy in Its Scientific Aspects1 Dr. Berthold Kern calls attention to a forgotten book of the German physician Scheidemantel, published in 1787. Its title was The Emotions as Remedies. It seems to be very rare since even our Surgeon General's Library has no copy of it. The author treated psychotherapy sys- tematically. He insisted that man was a unit in which body and soul mutually influenced each other. Scheidemantel blamed the moralists for considering the soul exclusively and the physicians for thinking only of the body. He thought that this was a serious mistake for both sides and he seems to have anticipated much of our recent discussion on the influence of the body and 1 Die Psychische Krankenbehandlung im Ihren Wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen, Berlin 1910.
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