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Psychosomatic Medicine 21:473-488 (1959)
© 1959 American Psychosomatic Society

On the Psyche and Warts

I. Suggestion and Warts: A Review and Comment

MONTAGUE ULLMAN M.D.1

1 Department of Dermatology and Syphilology, Postgraduate Medical School, and the Department of Psychiatry and Neurology, New York University College of Medicine, New York

The literature on the suggestion therapy of warts has been reviewed and the areas of general agreement among the various investigators have been noted. With due consideration to the rate of spontaneous recoveries (as near as this can be determined by studying large groups of patients with warts), the cure of warts can be brought about by psychological means generally associated with the term "suggestion." Some authors go so far as to imply that this is the most important factor underlying the successful treatment of warts by x-ray, drugs, and even surgery. All agree that in one way or another an affective response must be set up in the patient.

An attempt was made to reconsider the work of earlier investigators from the viewpoint of the nature and goal of the personal relationships established. For the most part, they represented a heightening of the authoritarian relationship between doctor and patient in an effort to reproduce clinically some of the psychological factors which obtain in lay healing, e.g., the combination of submission and helplessness on the part of the subject and the aura of omnipotence and infallibility on the part of the healer or healer-symbol. The ritual involved in the various lay approaches and the procedures employed in the medical techniques to effect a cure by suggestion both result in the temporary suspension of the discriminative, critical, and evaluative faculties of the patient in favor of certain emotional reactions engendered by the situation. These reactions are as yet not very clearly defined. The considerations here presented warrant the further exploratory use of hypnosis as a procedure incorporating many of the elements that appear to be involved in the various accounts of the cure of warts by suggestion.

Submitted on June 5, 1959




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P. D. Shenefelt
Hypnosis in Dermatology
Arch Dermatol, March 1, 2000; 136(3): 393 - 399.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]


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