Readers reflect on Aida Edemariam’s piece about what can be a fine line between physical symptoms and conditions dismissed as being ‘all in your head’
While enjoying Aida Edemariam’s review of current neuro-psychological research (The mind/body revolution: how the division between ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ illness fails us all, 26 January), I disagree with her assertion that “A conceptual division between mind and body has underpinned western culture, and medicine for centuries. Illnesses are ‘physical’, or they are ‘mental’.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the term “psychosomatic” in the late 18th century to describe bodymind conditions, while the term “placebo” was first used in the same period, referencing a link between imagination and physical symptom. A few years later, in 1800, the physician John Haygarth published the widely read pamphlet Of the Imagination As a Cause and a Cure of Disorders of the Body.
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