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Overcoming the fear of contagion
As our horses walked calmly along the trail, my fellow riders and I enjoyed a fun spring outing. Then, suddenly one of the horses spooked for some unknown reason, swerving and bolting frantically down the path. The other horses followed suit. There was no apparent reason for this panicked, out-of-control behavior, but because one of them had felt fear, they were now all exhibiting it.
I never did learn what had alarmed that horse, but it was a lesson for me in how contagion appears to work. Fear can be unwittingly picked up and acted out. In other words, a mental condition finds expression in what we experience.
In her primary work, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy, Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, tells of a tragic occurrence that illustrates this point: “A man was made to believe that he occupied a bed where a cholera patient had died. Immediately the symptoms of this disease appeared, and the man died. The fact was, that he had not caught the cholera by material contact, because no cholera patient had been in that bed” (p. 154).
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