Physical and Mental health prove tolerable

The researchers concluded that only occasionally is illness the result of a chance encounter with germs, or injury, or other physical environmental factor. They concluded, too, that inheritance and constitution are relatively unimportant in determining susceptibility to physical illness when compared to life situations and how the individual perceives and is able to cope with them.

 When 42 children hospitalized for physical illness and 45 healthy children were studied for psychological differences, the sick children were found to have experienced significantly more personal losses and other stress situations, and usually their physical illness had followed, within one month, a social or psychological change important to them.

Evidence that intense rage may lead to serious surgical emergencies came in a study of 20 consecutive patients with perforated ulcers. Most were found to have been recently faced with situations they believed damaging to their self-esteem and to which they had reacted with rage. It has become possible to measure, in laboratory trials, physical reactions not only to emotional stress in general but to specific stresses such as fear, frustration, and feelings of hopelessness. 

In one of many such studies, rats were divided into three groups: one received electroshock; the second received the electroshock preceded by warning signals; the third received neither shock nor signals.

The rats exposed to the warnings first and then the shock-i.e., to emotional stress through anticipation of pain-had the highest sickness and death rates. In one study with human subjects, topics uncomfortable to them were discussed (stress interviews) while blood pressure was monitored and heart output and blood flow through the coronary arteries were checked with radioactive tracer materials and counting devices. 

The study revealed that when anger was aroused during an interview, there was a marked increase in coronary blood flow, a significant blood pressure rise, and an increase in heart output. Much the same happened in interviews covering anxiety-provoking subjects. It has long been suspected that in some societies, voodoo death is produced by creating a conviction of doom in the victim.