Ritual diseases / by Victor G. Plarr.

  • Plarr, Victor, 1863-1929.
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Ritual diseases / by Victor G. Plarr. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    )^Erven F. Bohn RITUAL DISEASES. BY VICTOR G. PLARR, M. A. Oxon. London. That certain diseases produce specific mental states, leading to special courses of action, is an accepted fact in medicine, but it is at least open to question, whether these states and their manifestations in action are pathological in any given case or merely ritual and imitative. It is a question, too, whether men, especially primitive men, ever rightly diagnose the disease from which certain mental and physical symptoms have arisen. Thus the bite of a mad dog led, it was anciently supposed, to dread of water, but it has now been shown that sufferers from hy- drophobia are also the victims of tetanus, and that the frantic effort to open the mouth on the patient’s part may very well have led onlookers to suppose him convulsed with terror of water, while of course his inability to open his jaws and consequently to swallow anything gave further support to the supposition. Hydrophobia, therefore, is in some sort a picturesque disease, an affair of the imagination. Lockjaw, not fear of water, is the result of mad dog bite. On the other hand, it is a question whether, among primitive peoples, suggestion does not play a part, leading the victim of hydrophobia either to fear water actually or to act that fear in a ritual manner. Again, the Sudor Anglicanus, or Sweating Sickness, is now known to have been miliary fever in some form or other, but, in the Middle Ages, it was often artificially induced or merely imitated. A sufferer from the acute dyspepsia born of a mediaeval surfeit, let us say, was put to bed by his friends, who decided that he had the sweating sickness, and proceeded to subject him to a fixed ritual treatment. He very soon perspired profusely under heaps of bed clothes and super- imposed humanity, for his friends stretched themselves across him, it is said, the father, or eldest male ascendant in the family taking the place of honour across his chest and the rest ranging themselves over the other portions of the body according to precedence. Profuse perspiration