May, Arthur:

$500 · Offered by William Reese Company · No longer available

AN INAUGURAL DISSERTATION ON SYMPATHY...FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF MEDICINE. Arthur May, a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, puts forth the theory that medicines cure disease not by specifically neutralizing pathogens, but rather by introducing "new actions" to the body that leave no room for the action of disease. This, he asserts, is what accounts for multiple cures of a single ailment, often illustrated by the surprising effects of emotions upon illness. As historian Sarah Knott notes, the emphasis placed on nervous sensibility by the 18th-century medical establishment reflected a broader shift "away from fluids—where the humoral tradition had invited attention—to the nervous system that ran through the fibers." "In the specifically Scottish-turning-Philadelphia medical milieu," explains Knott, "sensibility was the fundamental quality of the nervous system that united mind and matter," while "[s]ympathy was a special case of sensibility: the nervous connection between sensible parts and, by some but not all systems, the primary means of integrating the body." Hence, Arthur May's conclusion: "In a word, the whole system, mind and body, is one mass of general sympathy: no sooner is any part affected, than the impression is communicated throughout the whole. Sympathy is the conductor of disease, and this same sympathy is the agent of cure. All the operations of medicines, I have ever witnessed, appeared to have been performed by the agency of sympathy."

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