Suggestion and psychotherapy / by George W. Jacoby.

  • Jacoby, George W., 1856-1940.
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Suggestion and psychotherapy / by George W. Jacoby. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of a species of psychic disorder which manifested itself in a belief that the afflicted person had been turned into a wolf or a dog. These patients, es¬ pecially with the approach of spring, were swayed by an irresistible impulse to follow the habits of wolves and dogs and to pass their nights in lone¬ some burial places. The old and wide-spread belief in the existence of man-wolves seems to have furnished the basis for this delusion. In not a few instances this fancy has become epidemic and hundreds of per¬ sons have become cannibals, going on all fours, living in forests, and howling like wolves. Other persons imagined themselves to be dogs and went about snarling at all whom they passed. In some cases, without having been bitten, or without even having come in contact with dogs, they barked, frothed at the mouth, and in every act simulated rabies. This spurious hydrophobia, of course, had nothing in common with lyssa, or true rabies. Zander relates that Marcellus of Sidoc in Pam- philia, a Grecian physician of the time of Marcus Aurelius, has described such a lycanthropic epi¬ demic in hexameters, and from a later Arabic author we learn that in the sixth century B. C.