BODY AND MIND. 219 



impregnated with a thorough disgust of the government of George 

 the Fourth that he threw up a lucrative situation in one of the Royal 

 yards," induced his youngest son to go and do likewise. This 

 thoroughgoing Radical insisted, moreover, that his wife, aged 70, 

 " toothless for years, and her hair as white as the snow on Mont 

 Blanc, should accompany them to the land where God's creatures 

 were permitted to inhale the pure, old, invigorating atmosphere of 

 freedom. About six or seven years after their departure, a friend 

 living in New York gave an excellent account of their proceedings. 

 Not only could the old man puff away in glorious style, and the son 



do well as a portrait-painter, but old Mrs. had cut a new set of 



teeth, and her poll was covered with a full crop of dark brown hair ! " 



Some of the most remarkable results of an unusual mental 

 stimulus upon the body, are witnessed in cases wherein specific 

 diseases have not merely been simulated, but have actually been 

 induced, by the lucid description of them in the hearing of the per- 

 sons who became thus mysteriously affected. Lecturers on the 

 practice of medicine in our universities and medical schools rarely, 

 if ever, deliver a statutory course to their students without exem- 

 plifying the truth of the foregoing observation. The writer well 

 remembers an instance in point, occurring in a class-fellow of his own 

 who attended the practice of physic class with him. During and 

 after the description of skin diseases, this student suffered extremely 

 from skin irritation, induced by his too vivid realisation of the sym- 

 ptoms described by the lecturer. These uncomfortable morbid feelings 

 culminated one day when the lecturer described the symptoms of a cer- 

 tain disease supposed to possess a special sphere of distribution in the 

 northern parts of Great Britain. For days afterwards, the student was 

 tormented by an uncomfortable and persistent itching between the 

 fingers, which no treatment seemed to alleviate ; but which passed 

 away when an eruption of a simple type appeared on his hands, the 

 latter induced by no known cause, but apparently as the result of the 

 morbid mental influences to which he was subject. Not a session 

 passes in our medical schools but the lecturer on physic has occa- 

 sion to quiet the nervous fears of nervous students, who simulate in 

 themselves the symptoms of heart disease, and require the gravest 

 assurances that their fears are ungrounded, and that they have simply 

 been studying with a morbid interest the lecturer's remarks on heart 

 affections. 



In his work entitled " De ITmagination," Demaugeon tells us 

 that Nebelius, lecturing one day upon intermittent fever, and lucidly 

 describing ague, noticed one of his pupils to become pale, to shiver, 

 and to exhibit at last all the symptoms of ague. This lad was laid 

 up for a considerable period with a true attack of the fever in ques- 

 tion, and recovered under the usual treatment for the disease. If, 



