False Hydrophobia

Editor

The above is the caption of a story appearing in the newspapers which is but a repetition of many similar events.

It seems that at a hospital in Lynn, Mass., a young man named William F. Waters recently died as the result of what physicians, in late years, have come to call "false hydrophobia."

After his death the doctors diagnosed the case and pronounced it false hydrophobia. They said Waters imagined he had that disease and worried himself into the semblance of it. About a year before, he was bitten in the hand by a dog. Would-be jokers predicted that he would have hydrophobia and, as a result, he became melancholy.

The physicians, of course, found no connection whatever between the dog-bite and the appearance of the disease, except the mental state.

This unfortunate incident ought to set people seriously to thinking along the line of mental conditions in their relation to physical manifestations of disease. The morbid mental state that will bring on an hallucination of the kind we are considering, will produce similar effects as to' other diseases. Such results are by no means confined to hydrophobia. The mind which dwells, in fear, upon any illness, is apt sooner or later to manifest that illness physically, unless the morbid mental condition is removed by the destruction of the fear.

It is fortunate for humanity that a system has at last been established which teaches that all sickness is but mental hallucination physically manifested, and still more fortunate that this same system also teaches how to destroy the fear which produces such hallucinations.

The incident should also teach the people who joke as did the friends (?) of Mr. Waters, the folly and danger of such joking. The instances are not few where fatal sicknesses, of various kinds, have been superinduced in just that thoughtless way.

When men display the same degree of earnestness and persistence in living the righteous life that they now show in following what they please to call the "strenuous life," trusts will no longer terrorize, strikes will cease to be, and labor will fraternize with capital. The righteous life alone can bring this about, and Christian Science means righteous living.

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