both among her friends and her critics. She desired a diagnosis at which no man or woman could cavil. She did not believe that her husband had cancer, or that his heart was defective, but that he was suffering from suggestion. She believed that a practising physician, trained in natural science, would bear her out in this and thus clinch her own diagnosis. But she was ahead of her age. Experimental psychology had not then made the important discovery that the deadliest poison is a secretion engendered by the working of hatred.[1]
That Mr. Eddy suffered greatly, and that Mrs. Eddy suffered with him in her deep affection and sympathy is vouched for. A student who came
- ↑
The Washington Herald in August, 1907, printed an article descriptive
of the experiments of Professor Elmer Gates in his laboratory of psychology
and psychurgy. The article was also printed in the Chicago Tribune. It
states: “Professor Gates has shown the causative character of thinking in a
long series of most comprehensive and convincing experiments. He found that
change of mental state changed the chemical character of the perspiration.
When treated with the same chemical re-agent the perspiration of an angry
man showed one color, that of a man in grief another, and so on through the
list of emotions, each mental state persistently exhibiting its own peculiar
result every time the experiment was repeated.
“When the breath of Professor Gates’ subject was passed through a tube cooled with ice, so as to condense its volatile constituents, a colorless liquid resulted. … He made his subject angry and five minutes afterwards a sediment appeared in the tube which indicated the presence there of a new substance produced by the changed physical action caused by a change of the mental emotion. Anger gave a brownish substance, sorrow gray, etc. … Each kind of thinking produced its own peculiar substance which the system was trying to expel. … Professor Gates undertook to discover the character of the substances which he obtained by condensation of the breath of his subjects. The brownish precipitate from the breath of any persons administered either to men or to animals caused stimulation and excitement of the nerves. Another substance, produced by another kind of discordant thinking, when injected into the veins of a guinea pig or a hen, killed it outright. … The deadliest poison known to science is hate. Professor Elmer Gates is the man who has found it out, … who has demonstrated it.”
