apes, owls; that they are heavy, light, transparent, great and little,
senseless and dead (as shall be showed more at large, in our [1615]
sections of symptoms), can be imputed to nought else, but to a corrupt,
false, and violent imagination. It works not in sick and melancholy men
only, but even most forcibly sometimes in such as are sound: it makes them
suddenly sick, and [1616]alters their temperature in an instant. And
sometimes a strong conceit or apprehension, as [1617]Valesius proves, will
take away diseases: in both kinds it will produce real effects. Men, if
they see but another man tremble, giddy or sick of some fearful disease,
their apprehension and fear is so strong in this kind, that they will have
the same disease. Or if by some soothsayer, wiseman, fortune-teller, or
physician, they be told they shall have such a disease, they will so
seriously apprehend it, that they will instantly labour of it. A thing
familiar in China (saith Riccius the Jesuit), [1618]"If it be told them
they shall be sick on such a day, when that day comes they will surely be
sick, and will be so terribly afflicted, that sometimes they die upon it."
Dr. Cotta in his discovery of ignorant practitioners of physic, _cap. 8_,
hath two strange stories to this purpose, what fancy is able to do. The one
of a parson's wife in Northamptonshire, _An._ 1607, that coming to a
physician, and told by him that she was troubled with the sciatica, as he
conjectured (a disease she was free from), the same night after her return,
upon his words, fell into a grievous fit of a sciatica: and such another
example he hath of another good wife, that was so troubled with the cramp,
after the same manner she came by it, because her physician did but name
it. Sometimes death itself is caused by force of phantasy. I have heard of
one that coming by chance in company of him that was thought to be sick of
the plague (which was not so) fell down suddenly dead. Another was sick of
the plague with conceit. One seeing his fellow let blood falls down in a
swoon. Another (saith [1619]Cardan out of Aristotle), fell down dead (which
is familiar to women at any ghastly sight), seeing but a man hanged. A Jew