308 



KNOWLEDGK ♦ 



[August 2, 1886. 



lias given them.' " Many in like manner were cured 

 through their foith in Father Mathew (not in teetotalism, 

 be it understood) ; and even after his death many who went 

 lame to his tomb left their crutches there. It was not 

 necessary that the patient should be of the worthy father's 

 persuasion in religion. Many staunch Protestants were 

 cured by him. as they supposed ; but in reality by processes 

 taking place within their own minds, an 1 initiated by their 

 own lively imaginations. Whether after cure such persons 

 remained as staunchly Protestant as they had been before, I 

 do not know.* 



In a similar way may be explained (or rather must be 

 explained, when due account is taken of the weight of 

 evidence) many cases in which maledictions seem to have 

 taken effect, as by a miracle. Paralysis, which has been 

 often cured b}' faith, has been produced, though less often, 

 by terror. In the Medical Gazette for May 23, 1868, there 

 is a report of a singular case which occurred at the Limerick 

 Sessions. Two men had been charged with having assaulted 

 a relative. " The prosecutor summoned his own father as a 

 witness. The mother of the prisoners, exasperated at the 

 prospect of her sons being sent to prison on the evidence of 

 her own relative, gave expression to her feeling in a male- 

 diction, praying that when the old man left the witness-box 

 he might be paralysed, and paralysed he was accordingly, 

 and had to be taken to the hospital. Such miraculous 

 illness not yielding readily to ordinary modes of treatment, 

 the old lady has been requested to remove her curse by 

 spitting on the patient, but this she sternly refuses to do, 

 anil the man remains in the hospital." Unfortunately, the 

 end of the story was not given. It would have been 

 pleasing to learn that in the long run the old dame relented, 

 and by spitting on the invalid restored him to health, for 

 then the evidence of the influence of imagination would be 

 complete. 



Many will recall here the story of " Goody Blake and 

 Harry Gill." Although Wordsworth calls this " a true 

 story," yet most persons probably imagine that, as related 

 by the poet, it is in a large degree a work of fiction. That 

 Wordsworth himself regarded the punishment of the hard 

 farmer as wrought by supernatural means is well known, 

 and comes out clearly on a comparison between his poetic 

 version of the event and tlie terse prosaic narrative by Dr. 

 Erasmus Darwin in his •' Zoiinomia." Yet the story was 

 true enough in all essential points as told by Wordsworth. 

 The elder Darwin's account of the case runs simply thus : — 

 " A young farmer in Warwickshire, finding his hedges 

 broken and the sticks carried away, during a frosty 

 season, determined to watch for the thief. He lay many 

 cold hours under a haystack, and at length an old woman, 

 like a witch in a play, approached and began to pull up the 

 hedge ; he waited till she had tied up her bottle of sticks, 

 and was carrying them off, that he might convict her of the 

 theft, and then springing from his concealment he seized his 

 prey with ^■iolent threats. After some altercation, in which 

 her load was left upon the ground, she kneeled upon the 

 bottle " {sic, it is the old-fashioned word for a " bundle ") 

 " of sticks, and raising her arms to heaven beneath the 

 bright moon, then at the full, spoke to the farmer, already 



* I was told a few months ago by a worthy, simple-hearted Irish 

 priest, that he was sent for on one occasion to administer the sacra- 

 ment of extreme unction to a Protestant lady, who (not knowing 

 that Catholicity was an essential preliminary) hoped to find in the 

 sacrament a cure for an attack of inflammation of the bowels, which 

 the doctors had in vain attempted to assuage. They hourly ex- 

 pected her death. Finding no other course open to her, she "made 

 submission," was received into the Church, and the sacrament of 

 extreme unction was administered. When next the family doctor 

 called the lady was well, save for the state of weakness to which 

 many hoars of extreme pain had reduced her. 



shivering with cold, ' Heaven grant that thou mai/est never 

 know again the blessing to be ivarm ! ' He complained of 

 cold all the next da}', and wore an upper coat, and in a few 

 days another, and in a fortnight took to his bed, always 

 saying nothing made him warm ; he covered himself with 

 very manj- blankets, and had a sieve over his face as he 

 lay " (the benefit expected from this arx'angement is not 

 altogether obvious) ; " and from this one insane idea he kept 

 his bed above twenty years, for fear of the cold air, till at 

 length he died." It was unfortunate for him, by the way, 

 that Turkish baths had not been introduced into England in 

 his time ! For probably if he had tried the radiating room 

 of a Turkish hammam he would have found that even the 

 old woman's curse did not prevent him from knowing what 

 it was to feel warm ; and once recognising this, he would 

 have been able, perhaps, to rise above the superstitious fears 

 to which in reality the sensation of cold was due. The 

 commonplace curse of an old woman whom even the least 

 censorious can hardlj' regard as altogether worthy of 

 absolute veneration, and who had probably exchanged some 

 rather coarse abuse with Gill in the preceding •' alterca- 

 tion," is rather amusingly changed by Wordsworth into 

 a solemn appeal to heaven by a much-injured victim 

 (after all, it must be remembered that Gill had not 

 hurt the old woman, and that a farmer has some right 

 to complain when his hedges are broken and the sticks re- 

 moved) : — 



Then Good}', who had nothing said, 



(having, it should seem, very little to say) — 



Her bundle from her lap let fall ; 

 And kneeling on the sticks she prayed 

 To God, who is the Judge of all ; 

 She prayed, her withered hand uprearing. 

 While Harry held her by the arm — 

 " God ! that art never out of hearing. 

 Oh may he nevermore be warm ! " 

 The cold, cold moon above her head. 

 Thus on her knees did Goody pray ; 

 Young Harry heard what she had said, 

 And tcy cold he turned away. 



Probably we may refer the effect of her malediction rather 

 to her appearance — as described by Dr. Darwin, " an old 

 woman like a witch in a play" — than to the solemnity of 

 her prayer. He believed, in his sudden fear, that she was 

 a witch, his imagination attributed to the witch's curse the 

 cold which naturally enough resulted from his long watch 

 on a bitter cold night, and his fears thus seemingly con- 

 fii'med so influenced his imagination thereafter, that he 

 experienced the constant sensation of cold described by 

 Darwin. That the actual temperattu-e of his body was also 

 affected may well be believed. For it is well known that 

 persons whose minds are affected undergo a loss of tempera- 

 ture. " In melancolie avec stupeur," says Dr. Ertzbischoff, 

 " the temperature is always below the normal amount." 

 But it is certain the actual loss of heat cannot have been 

 even nearly so great as the apparent, for, if it had, Gill 

 would certainly not have lived twenty years. 



I could cite many other illustrations of the influence of 

 the mind, whether stimulated bj- emotion or by expectation, 

 on the body and its functions ; but I have already exceeded 

 the space which I had intended to occupy. Let it suffice 

 now to caU attention to the extreme importance, both in a 

 physiological and in a psychological aspect, of the recog- 

 nition of this influence, and the necessity for more careful 

 and systematic study of its nature and limits than has yet 

 been made. It was said sneeringly by Dr. Elliotson, who 

 was a believer in the mesmeric or preternatural interpieta- 

 tion of effects now demonstrated to be due to imagination 

 only, that if Mr. Braid, Dr. Carpenter, and Dr. Holland 



