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.

    86/832 page 64
    Touch of the Hanged.—Some of the traditions which gather round the effect of contact with the body of a hanged person are curiously interesting from the standpoint of psychotherapy. This form of execution seems to have had a much more potent influence in producing therapeutic elements in the bodies of the victims than any other. We do not hear much of the touch of a beheaded person's body nor of any place in medicine for portions of the victims of execution by shooting, though Van Helmont claims curative proper- ties for these in lesser degree. All sorts of ailments were, however, supposed to be cured by the touch of a hanged person. Thomas Hardy in his Wessex Tales tells of a young woman in his time suffering from a paralyzed arm, apparently a form of paralysis due to a functional nervous condition, who was recommended by an old conjure doctor to touch her bared arm, as soon after the execution as possible, to the purple mark of the rope around the neck of a man who had been hanged. The doctor assured her this was the only means by which she could be cured. We would not be surprised to hear of her cure under such circumstances. Hardy has carefully collected his material regarding the traditions of the southern part of England, and he makes the hangman say, when the woman applies to him for permission to touch the body of the victim, that such a request had not been made for some years, but that there used to be many applicants when he was a younger man. He adds, moreover, that it was the custom to apply to the governor of the prison and that usually this application was made by the physician of the patient who accompanied him or her ou the visit to the corpse. There is no doubt that physicians did, in many cases, have recourse to such methods, and that the reasons for their belief in the efficacy of the touch of the dead was that they had seen the cure in this way of many puzzling diseased conditions, which their skill in wortcraft and herbal medicines had not enabled them to relieve. The touch of the corpse was sup- posed to bring about a turning of the blood, and this produced the good effects. Occasionally the patients fainted from terror, yet afterwards were found to be able to use limbs that had been quite beyond their control before. The story is typical of what happened in country districts all over Europe for centuries. Mummies.—How little distant we are from the use of such material for therapeutic purposes will be appreciated from the fact that mummy was used in medicine down nearly to the end of the eighteenth century. The first edi- tion of the Encyclopedia Brittanica (1768) said: We have two different substances preserved for medicinal use under the name of mummy, though both in some degree of the same origin. The one is the dried and preserved flesh of human bodies, embalmed with myrrh and spices; the other is the liquor running from such mummies, when newly prepared, or when affected by great heat or damps. The latter is sometimes in a liquid, sometimes of a solid form, as it is preserved in vials well stopped, or suffered to dry and harden in the air. The first kind of mummy is brought to us in large pieces, of a lax and friable texture, light and spongy, of a blackish brown color, and often damp and clammy on the surface: it is of a strong but disagreeable smell. The second kind of mummy, in its liquid state, is a thick, opaque, and viscous fluid, of a blackish color, but not disagreeable smell. In its indurated state, it is a dry solid substance, of a fine shining black color, and close texture, easily broken, and of a good smell; very inflammable, and yielding a scent of myrrh and aromatic ingredients while burn- ing. This, if we cannot be content without medicines from our own bodies, ought
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