Illustration of Person's Psychology Incorrectly Blamed

Some excerpts from Anthony Daniels in The New Criterion (via Arts & Letters Daily). I'm posting this mainly because of my interest in how people tend to assume, unless it is unequivocally shown otherwise, that psychological factors are responsible for other's illnesses -- which this illustrates...

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Whenever I think of medical progress and its effects upon human existence, which are both profound and yet not quite fundamental, peptic ulcers always come to my mind. This is because much of my childhood and adolescence was dominated by peptic ulceration—my father’s, to be precise. Looking back on it, his ulcers affected the mood in our household (gloom tempered by storm), and even what we ate.

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In my father’s day, it was more or less an orthodoxy that duodenal ulcer was caused, if not entirely, then at least largely by psychological factors. Indeed, research into the kind of people who got ulcers was almost the foundation of psychosomatic medicine. In a book published in 1937, entitled Civilization and Disease, by Dr. C. P. Donnison, the flowing statement is made: “The statistics indicate that chronic peptic ulcer shows a low incidence in the more primitive races and a greater incidence in those races more in contact with civilization.”

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In the early 1980s, two Australian investigators showed that duodenal ulcer is, in most cases, an infectious disease, caused by a germ called Helicobacter pylori. This was so novel an hypothesis, rendering so much previous work and opinion nugatory, that the medical world had difficulty in accepting it. I remember the shock of reading the papers in The Lancet twenty years ago. The exasperated Dr. Barry Marshall, who was ridiculed at first, followed Dr. Hunter’s apocryphal example, swallowed a culture of Helicobacter himself to prove the hypothesis, and promptly suffered from severe gastritis.

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If the bacterial cause of duodenal ulcer had been known during my childhood and adolescence, how different would my life have been? My father would not have paced the floor night after night; he would not have been nearly killed by surgery; his temper would have been more equable. There would have been more affection in the household, and we should not have wasted so much of our substance in silent emotional strife. My father would not have died a lonely old man, little mourned because unloved, knowing that he would not be missed.