Travels by Michael Crichton

Warts, goiter, and parathyroid disease responded to both surgery and psychotherapy, suggesting that these illnesses might have direct mental causes.
    And, finally, it was everybody’s ordinary experience that the minor illnesses in our own lives—colds, sore throats—occurred at times of stress, times when we felt generally weak. This suggested that the ability of the body to resist infection varied with mental attitude.
    All this information interested me enormously, but it was pretty fringe stuff in the 1960s in Boston. Curious, yes. Worthy of note, yes. But nothing to pursue in a serious way. The great march of medicine was headed in another direction entirely.
    Now, I was getting these data from the heart attack patients. And what I was seeing was that their explanations made sense from the standpoint of the whole organism, as a kind of physical acting-out. These patientswere telling me stories of events that had affected their hearts in a metaphorical sense. They were telling me love stories. Sad love stories, which had pained their hearts. Their wives and families and bosses didn’t care for them. Their hearts were attacked.
    And pretty soon their hearts were
literally
attacked. And they experienced physical pain. And that pain, that attack, was going to force a change in their lives, and the lives of those around them. These were men in late middle life, all undergoing a transformation that was signaled by this illness event.
    It made almost too much sense.
    Finally I brought it up with Herman Gardner. Dr. Gardner was then chief of medicine at the hospital, and a remarkable, extremely thoughtful man. As it happened, he was the attending physician who made rounds with us each day. I said to him that I had been talking with the patients, and I told him their stories.
    He listened carefully.
    “Yes,” he said. “You know, once I was admitted to the hospital for a slipped disc, and sitting in bed I began to wonder why this had happened to me. And I realized that I had a paper from a colleague that I had to reject, and I didn’t want to face up to it. To postpone it, I got a slipped disc. At the time, I thought it was as good an explanation as any for what had happened to me.”
    Here was the chief of medicine himself reporting the same kind of experience. And it opened up all sorts of possibilities. Were psychological factors more important than we were acknowledging? Was it even possible that psychological factors were the most important causes of disease? If so, how far could you push that idea? Could you consider myocardial infarctions to be a brain disease? How would medicine be different if we considered all these people, in all these beds, to be manifesting mental processes through their physical bodies?
    Because at the moment we were treating their physical bodies. We acted as if the heart was sick and the brain had nothing to do with it. We treated the heart. Were all these people being treated for the wrong organs?
    Such errors were known. For example, some patients with severe abdominal pain actually had glaucoma, a disease of the eye. If you operated on their abdomens, you didn’t cure the disease. But if you treated their eyes, the abdominal pains disappeared.
    But to extend that idea more broadly to the brain suggested something quite alarming. It suggested a new conception of medicine, a whole new view of patients and disease.
    To take the simplest example, we all believed implicitly the germ theory of disease. Pasteur proposed it one hundred years before, and it had stood the test of time. There were germs—micro-organisms, viruses, parasites—that got into the body and caused infectious disease. That was how it worked.
    We all knew that you were more likely to get infected at some times than others, but the basic cause and effect—germs caused disease—was not questioned. To suggest that germs were always out there, a constant factor in the environment, and that the disease process therefore