Signs of the Times [London Standard]            Most medical men are agreed that seventy-five percent of the cases of influenza they have recently attended have been directly induced by fear. A doctor who was asked what chiefly caused this fear, answered at once that it was the alarmist section of the press.          "The best way to avoid these epidemics," he said, "is to keep the consciousness of their existence out of your mind; but it takes a very strongly controlled person to do that when half the newspapers are devoting columns to the 'influenza peril,' morbidly defining symptoms and suggesting safeguards. Every time a man reads of the ravages of influenza he unconsciously adds to his store of fear of the disease. Fear lowers the resistance against it as much as poor nutrition — probably more. If you ignore influenza, influenza will usually ignore you."          "But surely," it was suggested, "it is the duty of the press to help all it can in the fight against the disease." "Granted," was the doctor's reply, "and the best way to do this would be to suppress all news about it, and to print all the lively and jolly bits of news that could be gathered. That fear induces the condition that inspires it is a scientific fact, not a crankism. If you read an amusing story you laugh, and your system responds to the action of the mind; if you read anything depressing, your mind and body suffer depression; if you read of exciting adventures your heart beats more quickly and your breath comes more rapidly, and so on. Therefore, if you read about influenza morning, noon, and night, your mind and body, unless specially trained, become affected, and possibly infected, by the disease your consciousness dwells upon. If the psychology of disease were understood more generally, half the doctors would need to find a new profession."

London (England) Standard
Quoted in "Signs of the Times"
Christian Science Sentinel, August 23, 1919

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