In the Magdalen Asylum, at Edinburgh, a girl was seized with typhus fever, at the time that it was raging in the city, and though she was instantly removed, as well as all her bed-clothes &c., two more were seized next day, and an alarm or panic was soon spread over the whole house. Next day, no fewer than sixteen were in the sick-room, and in the course of four days, out of a community of less than fifty individuals, twenty-two were apparently labouring under decided fever. It now struck Dr. Hamilton that there was mad delusion in all this, and that the disease arose as much from panic and irritation as from any other causes. Acting on this belief, he went to the sick-room, and told the girls that such a rapid spread of the disease was entirely unprecedented; that they were under the delusion of yielding to their fears, and of imitating others who were now undergoing all the tortures of bleeding, blistering, and purging, in Queensbury Hospital. He assured them that the fumigation and other precautions must have destroyed the contagion, and that if they would only keep a good heart and dismiss their fears, he would pledge himself the fever would soon disappear. The effect of the Doctor’s speech was magical. All apprehension was instantly banished from the mind, the cheering influence of hope was inspired, moral courage was developed, and the progress of the pestilence stopped. Not one case of fever occurred afterwards, and those who had the fever at the time perfectly recovered.[54] It is only on the same principle that we can account for the success which Dr. A. T. Thompson met with in the treatment of the following case of whooping-cough, which had been kept up by habit. The patient, a young boy, was threatened with the application of a large blister; although it was not applied, but merely placed within his view, yet the dread of it completely removed the cough. Boerrhave cured epilepsy in a whole school, by marching into it at the moment of the expected attack with a red-hot poker, which he threatened to thrust down the throats of those who should have a fit.