Sir James Paget thinks that by nervous excitement the temperature may be raised to at least 1010 F. (from the normal 98.5° F.); and Professor Wunderlich says on the same subject: * 'In hysterical neurosis elevations of the temperature even to excessive heights may occur without any motive at all.'† Sir S. Wilkes relates cases of extreme anaemia caused by depressing emotions; and this agrees with the experience of all medical men, as does also the opposite observation, that pleasant emotions bring about a good state of the blood and secretions, and improve the health. Instances in which the hair has rapidly, even in a few days, suffered atrophic changes, leading to its becoming white and falling out, from excessive depressing emotions, are common - and under similar circumstances the teeth will sometimes rapidly decay. To show the interdependence of organs, and how-even transitory ailments affect nutrition, Dr. Savill‡ quotes the case of a woman whose finger-nails for months exhibited cracks and deficiencies marking the period of severe sea-sickness.

* The remarkable growth of Christian Science is due to a great extent to the recognition by Mrs. Eddy and her followers of the foregoing facts. They tell people that, instead of being interesting, it is rather a mean thing to be ill. Some of them pretend to possess perfect health who formerly looked upon such a suggestion as almost an insult. Increased love of sport and exercise among women has done much to render the body more healthy and able to respond to mental stimulation. Times have changed since the days of Jane Austen, whose heroines were anaemic, and fainted on the smallest provocation; and even from those of Lord Beaconsfield, who wrote: 'At the present day, especially among women, one would suppose that health was a state of unnatural existence.' Now people threaten to go to the other extreme, and we hear of delicately-nurtured women under Christian Science teaching getting up and going about the house two or three days after childbirth, because the ' natural' and savage woman can do so with impunity. †' Medical Notes and Reflections,' London, 1839.

* 'Obscure Diseases of the Brain and Mind," London, 1860.

Dr. de Watteville says: § 'One of the most striking properties of the nervous system is that by which the activity of one portion may be arrested or prevented - "inhibited" - by the activity of another . . . when we attend closely to a sensory impression or to a train of thought, the excitability of every part of the brain, except that actually engaged in the act, is diminished by an inhibitory action of the working portion. Thus, when we say that anger or fear paralyzes, we allude in very accurate language to the inhibitory influence which powerful emotion exercises on the cerebral functions.' Sir Lauder Brunton, speaking of the effect of emotion on the organs, says: 'Whenever emotional excitement is prevented from discharging itself externally by motor channels it is very apt to vent itself upon the internal viscera, and the principal channel through which it does this seems to be the vagus.' He instances the description of emotion without outlet given by Tennyson, in his poem 'Home they brought her Warrior Dead,' and points out how the poet recognized the reciprocity between emotion and motor impulses when he described the relief which followed on the sufferer bursting into tears and embracing her child. *

* ' Medical Thermometry,' New Sydenham Society, 1871.

† I was once called to attend a medical man, whom I found in a state of great alarm on account of the way his temperature was rising. He was an extremely nervous man, suffering from overwork and anxiety, brought to a crisis by a severe attack of bronchial catarrh. He took his own temperature every few minutes, and in less than four hours it mounted from 1010 F. - which represented the amount of fever which one expected to be present - to 1040 F. He became almost delirious, and it took some time to soothe him; but in less than an hour the thermometer only registered 1020 F., and without any special treatment soon dropped to 100½ 0F. In this case nervous excitement may be credited with having forced a rise of at least 2° F. Krafft-Ebing, in the celebrated case of llma S., was able by suggestion in the hypnotic state to bring about almost immediate depression of temperature to the extent of 2° or 30 F., showing the relationship between psychical and somatic processes under certain conditions.

‡ 'A System of Clinical Medicine,' vol. ii., p. 775.

§ Sleep and its Counterfeits,' Fortnightly Review, May, 1887.

Dr. Charles Mercier, in his recent work, ' Sanity and Insanity,' refers to the rapid pigmentary change both as regards the hair and the skin produced by excitement and emotion, and gives as an instance the case of a young Bengalee with perfectly black hair, who was arrested on a grave charge and publicly examined. The danger and horror of the situation so affected him that his hair actually changed colour before the eyes of the spectators, and in the space of half an hour was of a uniform grey tint. That emotion and fancy have power to modify the secretions is shown by the well-known fact that the mouth becomes dry and parched through fear or anger, while on the other hand it ' waters' at the idea of savoury food, the mental impression paralyzing or stimulating the secretory apparatus of the salivary glands. Violent emotion, again, will so modify the secretion of gastric juice as to cause indigestion in subjects at all predisposed to it. An attack of jaundice may be induced by anger - as the popular saying, 'Green with rage,' implies - from an accumulation of bile in the blood through nervous excitement causing 'inhibition' of the healthy function of the liver.

* 'On Inhibition,' West Riding Reports, 1874.

Disease, then, as we have seen, may, in hypochondriasis and kindred states, be induced by auto-suggestion, and there is no doubt that it may likewise be induced by suggestion from without. Let a man be told repeatedly by his friends that he is looking ill, that he does not seem fit to go about, that he must take care of himself, or he will have this or that complaint - and unless he has a very cheerful and well-balanced mind, he is pretty sure, for a time at least, to deteriorate in health. There is a story of such suggestions being made, for a practical joke, at the expense of a stalwart farmer, who, having been assured by several persons that he seemed in a bad way, did really take to his bed and go through an unmistakable attack of illness. This, of course, was a cruel and unwarrantable jest: yet a somewhat similar effect is occasionally produced by well-meaning persons, who are in the habit of commiserating their acquaintance for not looking well. Laycock (op. cit., p. 112) says that the effect of 'fearful attention' has sometimes proved fatal, and instances the case of a man whose death that night was foretold by a ventriloquist at a dinner-party. So great was the effect of the prophecy that it fulfilled itself, and the unfortunate man actually died at about the time indicated.

Sir William Gowers, referring to the influence the imagination may have on functions which are ordinarily beyond the control of the will, says that vomiting may be produced by an emotion of disgust, and the needed emotion may be called up without sensorial agency, as is shown by the strange cases in which the husband has retched in sympathy with the vomiting of his wife in pregnancy, and has at last become so sensitive that sickness occurs as soon as he knows his wife is pregnant (' Diseases of the Nervous System,' vol. ii., p. 928).