830 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 175 



by shock or by a "broken heart," etc., has always been taken for 

 granted by clinicians, as well as by the man in the street, and has 

 been exploited by many writers of fiction. Eqnally ancient appears 

 to be the idea that witchcraft can cause the death of a person who 

 believes himself to be bewitched. The actual mechanism of such 

 "voodoo deaths" is still incompletely understood, and may, possibly, 

 result from either one of two meclianisms. Cannon (1942) shows 

 that death can occur from fear and rage, leading to shock due to the 

 workings of the sympathicoadrenal system. Richter (1957) demon- 

 strates that death can occur from hopelessness, which affects the 

 parasympathetic system ("vagus death"). In the "fear-rage death," 

 outlined by Cannon, death occurs during the systole; in the "hope- 

 lessness death," described by Richter, it occurs during the diastole. 



'\^niat is to be retained in this context is simply the fact that ex- 

 ternal life stress can result either in psychological or in physical 

 illness, or both (Hinkle and Wolf, 1957; Ilinkle et al., 1957) and 

 that psychic distress can produce severe, or even fatal, physical illness. 

 Tlius, the Mohave belief, that a traumatized person can make him- 

 self react ively ill and may actually die from such an illness, is sup- 

 ported by the most reliable findings of modern psychosomatic re- 

 search. Moreover, the IMohave belief that children are especially 

 prone to die as a result of psychic traumata perfectly dovetails with 

 Spitz's (1945, 1946), and Spitz and Wolf's (1946) richly documented 

 finding that emotionally starved children die even if they receive 

 excellent physical care in hygienically impeccable orphanages or 

 hospitals. 



This finding is of some importance for an objective evaluation of 

 Mohave psychiatric thought. Even though it is obvious (pt. 8, pp. 

 485-505) that a given primitive belief can be objectively "correct" 

 without thereby being necessarily also a product of scientific induction, 

 in this particular instance it seems legitimate to suggest at least ten- 

 tatively that the IMohave concept of the "psychic suicide" of children 

 has some of the formal characteristics of a scientific theory.^^ It is, 

 on the other hand, very important to understand that even the ob- 

 jective correctness of the Mohave theories in question, which ad- 

 mittedly have some of the formal characteristics of scientific theory, 

 does not mean that every pediatric case diagnosed by the JMohave 

 as "suicide" is actually a death from psychic causes. This mistake 

 is, however, not due to an inherent defect of their theory, but to an 

 error in its application; i.e., it is a misdiagnosis. The most striking 



■^3 It should be noted that the Mohave are far from unique In believlnj; that the "soul" 

 of the child is especially easily traumatized, and that such traumata can cause death. 

 This belief is also hold by many other primitive tribes, Including the Sedang of Indochina 

 (Dcvercux, MS., 1933-.'54), though this latter group did not evolve a theory of such deaths 

 that has the formal characteristics of a scientific theory. 



