Bodily reactions to mental stress

Abstract

If we accept the fact that any illness affects the whole person, and most people do, then there must be bodily reactions to mental stresses, just as there are mental reactions to physical illness. The term psychosomatic is used for such reactions and means mind and body. The concept is not new, though the term is, and has received varying support since the practice of medicine began. That great English physician Thomas Sydenham (1642–89) expressed the basis of the reaction well when he said—‘Tears unlet will make other organs weep’. Sydenham, sometimes known as the English Hippocrates, recognized that emotions could be indirectly expressed through the various organs of the body.