1984 Ulcer Quotes

But the pigs--seventy pounds of porcine weight that did not take kindly to weekly endoscopies--did not sprout any ulcers. And testing the theory on humans was ethically impossible: how could one justify infecting a human with a new, uncharacterized species of bacteria to prove that it caused gastritis and predisposed to cancer? In July 1984, with his experiments stalled and his grant applications in jeopardy, Marshall performed the ultimate experiment: "On the morning of the experiment, I omitted my breakfast….Two hours later, Neil Noakes scraped a heavily inoculated 4 day culture plate of Helicobacter and dispersed the bacteria in alkaline peptone water (a kind of meat broth used to keep bacteria alive). I fasted until 10 am when Neil handed me a 200 ml beaker about one quarter full of the cloudy brown liquid. I drank it down in one gulp then fasted for the rest of the day. A few stomach gurgles occurred. Was it the bacteria or was I just hungry?

Anger may be one of the most important and least appreciated of the emotions we generate. The celebrated psychoanalyst and ethicist Willard Gaylin published a book in 1984 titled The Rage Within, which explored the subject of anger in modern man. Because anger is so antithetical to our idea of appropriate behavior in a civilized society, we tend to repress it at the very moment it is generated in the unconscious and so remain unaware of its existence. There are many reasons, most of them unconscious, why we repress anger. They were enumerated in the psychology chapter (see here). The tendency to repress undesirable emotions is a supremely important element of one’s emotional life, and, again, we are indebted to Freud for the concept. We repress feelings of anxiety, anger, weakness, dependency, and low self-esteem, for obvious reasons. At the other end of the emotional spectrum, there is what Freud called the superego; this is our Moses. It tells us what we should and should not be doing, and it can be a hard taskmaster. In fact, it adds to the pressures that make us anxious and angry and so actually contributes to the tensions within us. As I have said earlier, people who get TMS tend to be hardworking, hyper-responsible, conscientious, ambitious, and achieving, all of which build up the pressure on the beleaguered self. One further observation. Just as there is a powerful tendency to repress undesirable emotions, there seems to be an equally strong drive to bring them to consciousness. It is this threat to overcome repression that necessitates the creation by the brain of such things as TMS, ulcers, and migraines.

ulcer