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.
