![]() ![]() In trials for Parkinson’s disease, as many as 65% report adverse events as a result of their placebo. Reviewing the literature, Mitsikostas has so far documented strong nocebo effects in many treatments for headache, multiple sclerosis, and depression. Over the last 10 years, doctors have shown that this nocebo effect – Latin for “I will harm” – is very common. Convinced it was the kiss of a steel blade, the poor man “ died on the spot”. Blindfolding him, they bowed his head onto the chopping block, before dropping a wet cloth on his neck. Planning to teach him a lesson, they sprung upon him before announcing that he was about to be decapitated. The 18th Century Viennese medic, Erich Menninger von Lerchenthal, describes how students at his medical school picked on a much-disliked assistant. “And we cannot fully explain it.”ĭoctors have long known that beliefs can be deadly – as demonstrated by a rather nasty student prank that went horribly wrong. “The nocebo effect shows the brain’s power,” says Dimos Mitsikostas, from Athens Naval Hospital in Greece. If you have ever felt “fluey” after a vaccination, believed your cell phone was giving you a headache, or suffered an inexplicable food allergy, you may have also fallen victim to a nocebo jinx. ![]() It may be the reason why certain houses seem cursed with illness, and why people living near wind turbines report puzzling outbreaks of dizziness, insomnia and vomiting. It’s called the “nocebo effect”.īut it is now becoming clear just how easily those dangerous beliefs can spread through gossip and hearsay – with potent effect. Vomiting, dizziness, headaches, and even death, could be triggered through belief alone. In the same way that voodoo shamans could harm their victims through the power of suggestion, priming someone to think they are ill can often produce the actual symptoms of a disease. Images printed by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.We have long known that expectations of a malady can be as dangerous as a virus. If I have grown as a historian since coming to Cambridge, it is a result of the many challenges, questions, tips, comments, and encouragements I have received in both of these environments. The second has been the chance to be a part of the research communities of both the History Faculty and the History and Philosophy of Science Department. The first has been the immense richness and range of the sources to which historians have access, at both the University Library and the college libraries. Two aspects of the research environment at Cambridge have been especially rewarding. ![]() If the moon was passing through Aries, this was a moment in which the patient was especially vulnerable to the disease: it was ‘a point of frenesie’.Įarly medicine can seem outlandish at first glimpse, but my research this year has left me admiring the sophisticated and satisfying ways in which it wove diverse natural phenomena into an intelligible whole. Frenzy was caused by a hot, dry, burning inflammation in the brain. Like the sun with which it rose, it was a hot, dry, fiery sign. A study of one disease – now defunct, once very real – channels some of the turbulent intellectual, social, and cultural currents which transformed English society during this period.Īries was the first constellation to rise on the eastern horizon in the morning, and therefore exercised its influence on the foremost part of the body, the head. Frenzy offers a vantage point onto this landscape of flux and continuity, precisely because it was thought to affect almost every part of the sufferer: the brain, the body, the mind, the memory, the emotions, and the soul. By the close of the century, medical theory had remained relatively stable, but large swathes of common knowledge about human nature, the cosmos, and the supernatural had been dismantled or refashioned. I wanted to explore how understandings of the disease changed in England before, during and after the religious reformations of the sixteenth century. My thesis, I had decided, would look at ‘frenzy’, a disease state which was observed, discussed, suffered, and treated across Europe and the Middle East from antiquity long into the early modern era. When I began my PhD in Michaelmas 2017, I did not picture myself spending long afternoons reading horoscopes.
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