Victorian Census is ‘evidence’ of ghosts
‘This challenges the assumption that such hallucinations are pathological’
Writing at the close of the 19th century, Jerome K Jerome observed how “the atmosphere at Christmas summons up ghosts like the dampness of summer rain brings out frogs and snails”. Victorian interest in the supernatural – strong at the best of times – was further heightened a few years later by a survey involving almost 20,000 people, the “Census of Hallucinations”, where almost one in 10 admitted to having seen or been touched by a ghostly apparition.
The Census may seem a curiosity of little scientific merit but Tom Dening, emeritus professor at Nottingham, notes in the journal History of Psychiatry that “by the standards of the time, its methods were well thought out”.
He selects for special mention the evidence relating to “death coincidences”, where people claim to have been visited by apparitions of friends or relatives – who they thought to be alive and well – at the time of their death.
A Yorkshire man who had emigrated to Australia described how on the evening of November 17 1891, he saw his aunt standing at the foot of his bed looking a bit older and stouter than when he had last seen her three years previously. Her lips moved as if saying “goodbye”. In due course the English newspapers arrived by boat and sure enough there was a death notice of his aunt who had indeed died that day.
There are 50 similar instances reported in the Census, so the probability they occurred “coincidentally” with the death of a friend or relative must be very small indeed. “This challenges the assumption that such hallucinations are pathological,” observes Prof Dening, by which he must mean that those ghostly apparitions are not necessarily a figment of the imagination.
Burping riddle
A woman troubled intermittently by episodes of nausea and constant burping might, it is suggested, have hidden lactose intolerance. “My symptoms would start first thing after my husband had brought me my early cup of tea in bed,” writes an Essex lady.
Since cutting out all dairy products she is much improved, though when she does occasionally indulge in a creamy pudding, she is happy to suffer the consequences.
Another woman reports that proximity to a Wi-fi hub or other source of electromagnetism such as a person with a Bluetooth-assisted hearing aid invariably causes a prickling sensation “followed by waves of nausea and burping”.
A family doctor from Lanarkshire reports his episodes were associated with pain between the shoulder blades from which he inferred the likely cause to be pressure on the sensory nerves to the stomach that arise from the thoracic part of the spinal cord.
He went to an osteopath who manipulated the relevant vertebrae and he has had no further occurrence.
“I have subsequently seen a number of patients with the same problem,” he writes.
The most likely explanation, however, is that this is a variant of “functional dyspepsia” due to impaired functioning of the muscles propelling the contents of the gut forward, or hypersensitivity to normal amounts of acid in the stomach. The former responds to drugs such as Maxolon and cisapride that improve gut motility, the latter to acid suppressants such as cimetidine, which reduce the volume of acidic gastric secretions.
Headache relief
Finally, further to recent comments in this column on the many diverse types of headache, a reader writes to tell how as a child he would develop a “nasty” headache whenever constipated – relieved almost immediately when he eventually opened his bowels.
Despite adopting a healthy high-fibre diet, he remains “sluggish” and now a return of the headache signals an incomplete evacuation promptly resolved by a further visit to the loo. Might others, he wonders, be afflicted?