EMOTIONS AND INFECTION. 343 



violent emotion is capable of causing and of curing intermittent 

 fever. In the latter part of June, 1889, M, Jullien, a surgeon of 

 Saint-Lazare, called me in consultation over a neurasthenic and 

 hypochondriac patient who thought he was suffering from ataxy. 

 He was a vigorous man, without any stigmatic marks of degener- 

 escence, but very emotional. He had had some attacks of marsh 

 fever in Poland about twelve years before, but had not suffered 

 from it since. At St. Petersburg, when near the place where 

 Czar Alexander II tragically perished, he experienced a violent 

 emotion, after which he suffered for three days attacks of well- 

 characterized fever. A new attack came on at Paris a few 

 months before my visit, corresponding with the emotion he ex- 

 perienced on finding a friend dead in the Hopital Beaujon. 



The old authors give the moral emotions a part in most erup- 

 tive fevers. "We meet them in the etiology of cholera. Pneu- 

 monia sometimes appears on the occasion of a strong moral emo- 

 tion. Rostan relates the story of a woman who was suddenly 

 struck with a very severe pneumonia on receiving news of the 

 death of her son. Grisalle observed it in a woman who, learning 

 that she had been robbed, experienced instantly a violent attack, 

 which was followed promptly by a chill, a stitch in the side, and 

 spitting of blood. 



Depressing emotions often seem to have an action on the de- 

 velopment of tuberculosis. Laennec believed that griefs and 

 annoyances were imxwrtant constituents in the frequency of 

 phthisis in large cities. 



Puerperal infection is also favored by depressing moral emo- 

 tions. " I have often in my practice,^' says M. Hervieux, " seen 

 young women in childbed, in a fair way toward recovery, take a 

 chill and become mortally ill after a visit or untimely reproaches 

 from their mother or relatives ; or after the agitation or per- 

 plexity occasioned by their resolving to abandon their child, un- 

 fortunate girls, till then doing well, falling ill on carrying out the 

 resolution and succumbing in a short time." Riviere, Willis, Den- 

 man, Delaroche, Paul Dubois, Alexis Moreau, Tonneld, and others 

 attribute an important part in the etiology of diseases of women 

 in childbed to the moral affections ; and this opinion is supported 

 by more recent observations. 



Tlie emotions, likewise, have a part in the evolution of surgical 

 diseases, and particularly in their infectious complications. The 

 theories recentlj'" put forth to explain contagion and immunity 

 from infectious diseases may agree with the facts we have learned 

 relative to the influence of the emotions. Among these theories 

 is one to which the facts lend an important support. In this 

 theory the mesodermic cells, and particularly the white globules, 

 are charged with the protection of the organism against the in- 



