Outwitting Our Nerves: A Primer of PsychotherapyJackson, Josephine A. (Josephine Agnes)
Science
Outwitting Our Nerves: A Primer of Psychotherapy
Jackson, Josephine A. (Josephine Agnes)
Nervous system -- Diseases; Psychoanalysis; Therapeutics, Suggestive
Sometimes it happens that a headache recurs periodically or at regular
intervals. It is easy to see that in such cases the exciting cause is
fear and expectation. At some time in the past, headaches have
occurred at an interval of, say, fourteen days; as the next
fourteenth day approaches the sufferer says to himself: "It is about
time for another headache. I am afraid it will come to-morrow," and of
course it comes. One man told me that if he ate Sunday-night supper he
inevitably had a headache on Monday morning. We were about to sit down
to a simple Sunday supper and he refused very positively to join us. I
told him he could stay all night and that I would take care of him if
the Monday sickness appeared. He accepted my challenge but was unable
to produce a headache. In fact, he felt so unusually flourishing the
next morning that he insisted on frying the bacon for my entire
family. That was the end of the Monday headaches.
=A Few Examples.= As sick-headache has always been considered a rather
stubborn difficulty, not amenable to most forms of treatment, it may
be well to cite a few cases which were helped by educational methods.
A patient came home from a walk one day and announced that he was
going to bed. When questioned, be said: "I am tired and I have a
sick-headache. Isn't it logical to go to bed?" To which I answered
that it would be far more logical to put some food into his stomach
and change the circulation than to lie in bed and think about his
pain. This man was completely cured. I have had patients throw up one
meal, and very rarely two, but I have never had to supply more than
three meals at a time. The waste of food I consider amply justified by
the benefit to the patient.
There once came to me an elderly woman, the wife of a poor minister.
She was suffering from attacks of nausea, which recurred every five to
ten days with intense pain through the eyes, and with photo-phobia or
fear of light. I found that she had by dint of heroic efforts raised a
large and promising family on the salary of an itinerant
minister--from four hundred to six hundred a year! All the time she
had been feeling sorry for herself because her husband did not
appreciate her. One day, after reading one of his letters which seemed
to show an utter lack of appreciation of all that she was doing, she
fell down in the field beside her plow, paralyzed. From that time on
she had been more or less of an invalid, continually nursing her
grudge and complaining that she ought not to have been made to bear so
many children.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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