Illness is in the Mind of the Individual

Toward the end of the great century of mechanistic progress in medicine, resistance to this rigid formula began to grow. Doubts were expressed whether the sharp line between body and mind, between "scientific medicine" and neurology's young brother, psychiatry, could be maintained.
Psychiatry was the scorned orphan of medicine because its area, the diseases of the mind, stubbornly refused to give physical evidence of their presence. Psychiatrists endeavored to find the cause of mental dis­ease in brain tissue, but all their brilliant anatomical research came to nothing except, for example, in general paralysis resulting from syphilis, and in senile dementia, the deterioration of the brain in old age. In these, at least, some physiological damage was discovered. Otherwise the most serious psychotics were found to have brains anatomically no different from that of any normal man.
But if brain anatomy proved to be a blind alley, progress was being made in the psychological research laboratories. Pavlov demonstrated scientifically by his conditioned reflex experiments that physical func­tions originate in a psychic impulse. Neurologists sought the nerve path­ways by which the subjective idea in the mind is translated into physical action.
In France, Charcot brought order out of the chaos of nervous disturbances. His pupil, the young Freud, followed him through the cham­bers of the Salpetriere, observing the many unhappy human beings whose illness was not understood because it was of the mind.
From the neurology of his day Freud set forth in new directions to explore the dark world of the unconscious. For all that he was hooted at in the streets of Vienna, the early teachings of psychoanalysis had a dynamic impact which could not be ignored for long.
In 1914 a brilliant cure of toxic goiter (hyperthyroidism) by psycho­therapy was reported in Germany. This was a case in which surgical treatment had been completely unsuccessful.
Signs of a change in medical thinking began to emerge, especially in gynecology. Freud's revelations of the depth and power of the sexual impulses gave pause to thoughtful medical men.
"There is too much minor gynecology and too little etiological [causal] thinking," wrote a leading professor of gynecology at the University of Berlin in 1925.
"... Their illness is a psychic conflict sailing under a gynecological Hag, which has escaped the attention of the quacks," declared the di­rector of the Woman's Hospital of the University of Tubingen.
Elsewhere, and in other branches of medicine, the same questioning voices were heard. In such prevalent ills as heart diseases and gastro­intestinal disorders, a literature began to grow on the possibility of psychic causes of physical illness.