"The wonderful influence of imagination in the cure of diseases is well known. A motion of the hand, or a glance of the eye, will throw a weak and credulous patient into a fit; and a pill made of bread, if taken with sufficient faith, will operate a cure better than all the drugs in the pharmacopœia. [...] Many hundreds of instances [...] might be related, especially from the history of witchcraft. The mummeries, strange gesticulations, and barbarous jargon of witches and sorcerers, which frightened credulous and nervous women, brought on all those symptoms of hysteria and other similar diseases, so well understood now, but which were then supposed to be the work of the Devil, not only by the victims and the public in general, but by the operators themselves."
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Original Language: English
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Sources
Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841), The Magnetisers
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Placebo_effect
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Placebo effect
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