Note 11* — Chapter XXIV · THE WILL.
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The operation of Ideas on the internal parts of the body is so familiar, that we meet everywhere with pleasant stories of it. Zachary Gray, in one of his notes on Butler’s Hudibras, alluding to the story of the countryman, who, receiving a prescription from the doctor, and being told by him to take that, swallowed the paper, asks, “And why might not this operate upon a strong imagination, as well as the ugly parson, the very sight of whom in a morning (Oldham’s Remains) would work beyond Jalap or Rhubarb; and a Doctor prescribed him to one of his patients as a remedy against costiveness: Or what is mentioned by Dr. Daniel Turner (De Morbis Cutaneis), that the bare imagination of a purging potion has wrought such an alteration in sundry persons, as to bring on several stools like those they call physical; and he mentions a young gentleman, his patient, who having occasion to take many vomits, had such an antipathy to them, that ever after he would vomit as strongly by the force of imagination, by the bare sight of the emetic bolus, as most could do by medicine. The application of a clyster-pipe, without the clyster, has had the same effect upon others.”—(Author’s Note.)