Volume 1
Lectures on surgical pathology : delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons of England / by James Paget.
- James Paget
- Date:
- 1853
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Lectures on surgical pathology : delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons of England / by James Paget. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)
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![the acts of nutrition by which the nerve-substance is formed, so, by reciprocal action, its exercise might affect the nutritive acts. As (for ilhistration sake) the completed blood affects all the processes by v^^hich itself was formed, so, we might su])pose, would the nervous force be able to affect all the acts of which itself is the highest product. But we need not be content with these probable de- ductions concerning the direct influence of the nervous force on the nutritive process. The facts bearing on the ([uestion seem sufficient for the proof. A first class of them are such as show the influence of the mind upon nutrition. Various conditions of the mind, acting through the nervous system, and by nervous force, variously affect the formative processes in the whole body. There is scarcely an organ the nutrition of which may not thus be affected by the mind. It is hardly necessary to adduce examples of a fact so often illus- trated ; yet I may mention this one :—Mr. Lawrence removed, several years ago, a fatty tumour from a woman's shoulder; and, when all was healed, she took it into her head that it was a cancer, and would return. Accord- ingly, when by accident I saw her some months after- wards, she was in a workhouse, and had a large and firm painful tumour in her breast, which, I believe, would have been removed, but that its nature was obscure, and her general health was not good. Again, some months afterwards, she became my patient at the Finsbury Dis- pensary : her health was much improved, but the hard lump in her breast existed still, as large as an egg, and just like a portion of indurated mammary gland. Having heard all the account of it, and how her mind constantly dwelt in fear of cancer, I made bold to assure her, by all that was certain, that the cancer, as she supposed it, would go away; and it (Ud become very much smaller, without any help from medicine. As it had come imder the influ-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b2128913x_0059.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
