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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    longed far beyond the natural period, and from habit ingrained upon the nervous system the whoop is likely to continue, though there is no necessity for it. It is this secondary period of the affection that the remedies have succeeded in shortening either apparently or in fact. Practically anything that is done for children is likely to instil the per- suasion that the whoop should disappear. Anything impressive will arouse this favorable attitude of mind toward the affection, and hence the remedies have obtained a reputation. In the interior of many countries draughts of sea water are a popular remedy for whooping cough. Sea water, it is said, loses its efficacy if carried long distances from the shore, so the children must be brought to the seaside. In mining regions children are taken down into the mines. The experience is enough of itself, especially when talked over a good deal in the family, and when the occasion is often the first outing that the child has had for months, to bring with it such improvement in health as will enable it to suppress the whoop. If the exposure to the mine air does not bring improvement, it is said to be either because the child was not taken deep enough, or because there was no gas in the air, or the wrong sort of mine was chosen, or some other plausible excuse is advanced. The development of scientific medicine, or at least what we are pleased to think of as more scientific therapeutics than they had in the past, has not kept us from having many and varied remedies for whooping cough, which, after being introduced on apparently good authority and apparently accomplishing many good results, have eventually been allowed to drop into innocuous desuetude. Whenever the administration of any such remedy was accompanied by strong suggestion—when the internal remedies were particularly distasteful, or the inhalations rather trying or at least sure to attract the attention of the sufferers—then good results followed. But the cures were due to the mental influences at work. In recent years various serums, including diph- theria serum, have been tried with reported good results. The giving.of the injection is one of those little operations that is likely to impress itself forcibly upon the child's mind, and when given in connection with the promise, implied or explicit, of improvement it is easy to understand that there will be a tendency to lessening the frequency of the whoop, at least during the sec- ondary periods of the disease. CHAPTER III GENUINE REMEDIES AND SUGGESTIVE EXAGGERATION The story of the suggestive use of drugs shows us many suggestions em- ployed even by distinguished physicians, men whose work is eminently rational and has lived long after their time. In fact, very few, even of the most dis- tinguished physicians, have failed to extol remedies which later proved to be quite ineffectual. Hippocrates felt quite sure that an external application of snake skin was a cure for all forms of that chronic skin manifestation, lichen. Pythagoras declared that anise seed held in the hand was an excellent remedy for epilepsy. These are only examples which serve to show how much sug- gestion has been used unconsciously by the medical profession. The sensation
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