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Cancer and the Mind

Maudsley Bequest Lecture delivered before the Royal College of Psychiatrists, February 1983

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

Steven Greer
Steven Greer*
Affiliation:
Academic Department of Psychological Medicine and Faith Courtauld Unit for Human Studies in Cancer, King's College Hospital, London S.E.5
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Extract

1848, as every student of history knows, was a revolutionary year in Europe. During that year, a minor, long forgotten revolution occurred in London medical circles when a physician, John Elliotson, published a paper entitled ‘Cure of a true cancer of the female breast with mesmerism’ (Elliotson, 1848). It is, as far as I can ascertain, the first recorded case of its kind. The author hypnotized his patient, a 42-year-old single woman, for “5 years and upwards … and for the greater part of the period three times a day”; during that time, Elliotson observed a ‘cancerous tumour’ in her right breast shrink away completely. No less than seven physicians and surgeons independently attested to the diagnosis of breast cancer, but no pathological examination was carried out. Elliotson was roundly abused, not for using hypnosis to treat cancer, but for using hypnosis at all—a practice condemned by certain physicians of fervid imagination as “indecent, disgraceful … liable to excite lascivious passions … an infernal system … the workings of Satan” (Elliotson, 1848).

Type
Lecture
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 143 , Issue 6 , December 1983 , pp. 535 - 543
Copyright
Copyright © 1983 The Royal College of Psychiatrists 

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