Monday, Jan. 26, 1953
Rejection Dyspepsia
Girls who do not get along with their fathers are likely to grow up sexually frigid, and when they marry they are candidates for indigestion and gallstones. Moreover, their husbands will probably take to drink or develop ulcers. These conclusions are reported by a Scottish physician in the eminent British Lancet. A painstaking Glasgow diagnostician, Dr. G. Gladstone Robertson did not go looking for patients to fit a prefabricated theory. Instead, he felt obliged to adopt the psychosomatic approach as the only way to explain the illnesses of hundreds of patients.
Dr. Robertson had a lot of men & women in his office complaining of indigestion before he noticed something odd. Nearly all the symptoms (acidity, distension, belching, nausea, vomiting) might be alike, but there was one consistent difference: the men had pain from the beginning of their illness, the women had all sorts of discomfort without actual pain, and nearly all were married.
Eventually, Dr. Robertson went over his records of 300 cases of "severe flatulent dyspepsia" and found only one man and three unmarried women. Of the married women in his records, all but six were frigid. One group of 128 had enjoyed marriage at first but then developed frigidity, often after having "too many" children. The larger group of 162 had been frigid all their adult lives. Dr. Robertson found that these were the women who as girls had hated a domineering or drunken father, and had clung to mother. As adults, five-sixths of them were still clutching mother's apron strings. And 23% of them developed gallstones.
Though there are links missing from the chain of cause & effect, Dr. Robertson is confident that disgust and nausea arie two vital links. It does little good, he says, to give drugs to counter these patients' states of mind or interfere with the working of their glands, or, finally, to operate, because the illness has been fixed by years of conditioning. Dr. Robertson's name for it: "rejection dyspepsia."
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