Mind and Body; or, Mental States and Physical ConditionsAtkinson, William Walker
Science
Mind and Body; or, Mental States and Physical Conditions
Atkinson, William Walker
Mental suggestion
The following, from a Philadelphia journal, gives a striking
illustration of the fact that the imagination is a _real_ factor
in many cases of physical ailment: "The fact that the throes of
the imagination under great nervous excitement often produce a
corresponding physical frenzy was illustrated recently in the case of
a man who had gone to sleep with his artificial teeth in his mouth.
Waking suddenly with a choking sensation, he found his teeth had
disappeared. He looked in the glass of water where they were usually
deposited, did not see them and realized they must be far down his
throat. Choking and struggling, he hammered on the door of a friend
sleeping in the house, who, seeing his critical condition, vainly
tried to draw the teeth out of the sufferer's throat. He could feel
the teeth, but had not the strength to extract them. He ran for a
blacksmith who lived a few doors away, but the blacksmith's hand was
too big to put into the man's mouth. A doctor had been sent for, but he
was so long in coming that the victim of the accident seemed likely to
die of suffocation before the physician arrived. A little girl of ten
years was brought under the impression that her small hand might reach
the obstacle and withdraw it, but she got frightened and began to cry.
The sufferer became black in the face, his throat swelled out, and his
friends expected every moment to be his last, when finally the doctor
arrived. He heard the history of the case, saw that the teeth were not
in the man's jaws nor in their nightly receptacle, felt the throat
and cast his eyes seriously upon the floor. _There, on the floor,
he saw the whole set of teeth._ He adjusted them to the jaws of the
patient, told him to breathe freely, and every symptom of suffocation
disappeared."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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