Imagination's Trickery: The Discovery of the Placebo Effect

Journal of the Historical Society

Volumn 10, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 57-73

  Justman, Stewart ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MONTANA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79951875318     PISSN: 1529921X     EISSN: 15405923     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5923.2009.00292.x     Document Type: Article

References (40)

1. Henry Beecher, "The Powerful Placebo," JAMA 159 19551602-06
2. On the Perkins tractor see James Delbourgo, "Common Sense, Useful Knowledge, and Matters of Fact in the Late Enlightenment: The Transatlantic Career of Perkins's Tractors," William and Mary Quarterly 61 2004643-684
3. Ulrich Tröhler, "To Improve the Evidence of Medicine": The Eighteenth-Century British Origins of a Critical Approach (Edinburgh: Royal College of Physicians, 2000); and David Wootton, Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006166-170
4. Francis Lobo, "John Haygarth, Smallpox and Religious Dissent in Eighteenth-Century England," in Andrew Cunningham and Roger French, eds., The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990217-253
5. Ordinarily Haygarth would have treated rheumatism with cinchona (quinine), now recognized as the first specific drug, though specific against malaria, not rheumatism. A few years after his exposé of the Perkins tractor Haygarth went on to publish A Clinical History of Acute Rheumatism.
6. John Haygarth, "Of the Imagination as a Cause and as a Cure of Disorders of the Body; as Exemplified by Fictitious Tractors and Epidemical Convulsions" (Bath: R. Cruttwell, 1800), 3-4. On the reception of Haygarth's argument see Christopher Booth, John Haygarth, FRS (1740-1827): A Physician of the Enlightenment (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2005106-07
7. Arthur K. Shapiro and Elaine Shapiro, The Powerful Placebo: From Ancient Priest to Modern Physician (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 25. Haygarth himself bled patients, one case being recorded in Booth, John Haygarth, 199741
8. The Perkins wand has symbolic associations ranging all the way from the rod of Asclepius (a satiric appellation used, in fact, by the cartoonist James Gillray) to Mesmer's magnetic rod. We still speak of "the magic touch." That some sought the magic touch over and over again suggests that they continued to believe in it even though its magic dissipated. See Shapiro and Shapiro, The Powerful Placebo, 18
9. In an experiment similar to his own, one of Haygarth's correspondents plays "the part of a necromancer," tracing geometric figures with false tractors made of ten-penny nails. Haygarth, "Of the Imagination," 17
10. Robert BurtonThe Anatomy of Melancholy (New York: NYRB Classics, 2001256-57
11. Haygarth, "Of the Imagination," 29
12. "Credulous" Eve: 1: 644. "Cure of all": l: 776.
13. Claude-Anne Lopez, "Franklin and Mesmer: An Encounter," Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 66 1993329
14. This in spite of the rhetoric of transparency and verifiable fact in which the Perkins tractor was advertised. See Delbourgo, "Common Sense, Useful Knowledge." For Delbourgo the experimenter's use of a placebo represents a "technique for policing knowledge claims," a loaded description. No notice is taken in this long article of the importance of Haygarth's findings in medical history or the indispensability of controls in medical research. On Haygarth's demand for evidence, see his letter (quoted in Lobo, "John Haygarth, Smallpox and Religious Dissent in Eighteenth-Century England," 7) to an associate of Jenner cautioning that "very full and clear evidence will be required" if Jenner's discovery of "vaccine inoculation" is to be believed. In time Haygarth was won over.
15. Haygarth, "Of the Imagination," 12.
16. Haygarth, "Of the Imagination," 1. Mark Akenside was a physician and author of a long poem on The Pleasures of Imagination, written at the age of twenty-three and inspired by Addison. The phrase "The Pleasures of the Imagination" appears in Spectator No. 411
17. On the healthy effects of mental recreation, see Glending Olson, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982
18. Haygarth's mock tribute, "Such is the wonderful force of the Imagination!" belongs to an age of satire. So too Benjamin Franklin's estimate of Mesmerism as a beneficial fraud. "There are in every great city a number of persons who are never in health, because they are fond of medicines and always taking them, whereby they derange the natural functions and hurt their constitutions. If these people can be persuaded to forebear their drugs in expectation of being cured by only the physician's finger or an iron rod pointing at them, they may possibly find good effects, though they mistake the cause." Cited in H. W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Doubleday, 2000631-32
19. A meaning not recorded in Johnson's dictionary but current in his time and indeed used by himself in Rambler No. 43, as cited in the OED. Recall too Haygarth's reference to "this popular illusion, which has so wonderfully prevailed, and spread so rapidly": "Of the Imagination," 4.
20. The astronomer of Rasselas is also cited in Lorraine Daston, "Fear and Loathing of the Imagination in Science," Daedalus 127 199877
21. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (New York: Knopf, 1992), 867. Even the well-known definition of imagination in Rambler No. 60 casts that faculty as an agency of deception: "All joy or sorrow for the happiness or calamities of others is produced by an act of the imagination, that realizes the event, however fictitious, or approximates it, however remote, by placing us, for a time, in the condition of him whose fortune we contemplate; so that we feel, while the deception lasts, whatever motions would be excited by the same good or evil happening to ourselves." My emphasis.
22. Smith was a sometime table companion of Johnson. For what it's worth, he was also a close friend of Haygarth's mentor, William Cullen. See Lobo, "John Haygarth, Smallpox and Religious Dissent in Eighteenth-Century England," 220
23. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 198250-51
24. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 51-52
25. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 183.
26. William Falconer, A Dissertation on the Influence of the Passions upon Disorders of the Body (London: Dilly and Phillips, 178848
27. When Haygarth proposed his experiment to Falconer, the latter "entirely approved the idea, and very readily consented to make the proposed trial upon the most proper cases which could be selected from his patients in the General Hospital" ("Of the Imagination," 2).
28. Falconer, A Dissertation on the Influence of the Passions upon Disorders of the Body, 23, 51.
29. He continues, "[These cases] clearly establish one rule of medical practice.... In the best manner possible a patient ought to be always inspired with confidence in any remedy which is administered," a point often made in their own way by placebo commentators today.
30. Martin Enserink, "Can the Placebo be the Cure "Science 289 (April 9, 1999): 238. See also Marcia Angell, "Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption," New York Review of Books, January 15, 2009
31. Shapiro and Shapiro, The Powerful Placebo, 95.
32. Haygarth, "Of the Imagination," 29.
33. Roger Ulrich, "View Through a Window May Influence Recovery from Surgery," Science, April 27, 1984420-21
34. Martina Amazio et al., "Response Variability to Analgesics: a Role for Non-specific Activation of Endogenous Opioids," Pain 90 2001212
35. Fabrizio Benedetti, Placebo Effects: Understanding Their Mechanisms in Health and Disease (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009
36. Howard Brody and David Waters, "Diagnosis Is Treatment," Journal of Family Practice 10 (1980): 447; and Howard Spiro, "Clinical Reflections on the Placebo Phenomenon," in Anne Harrington, ed., The Placebo Effect: An Interdisciplinary Exploration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 199742
37. Barry Oken, "Placebo Effects: Clinical Aspects and Neurobiology," Brain 131 20082812-2823
38. Haygarth, "Of the Imagination," 7.
39. Lene Vase et al., "The Contributions of Suggestion, Desire, and Expectation to Placebo Effects in Irritable Bowel Syndrome Patients: An Empirical Investigation," Pain 105 200319
40. Haygarth, "Of the Imagination," 30