Excerpt
I was just a tot when I first heard my mother whispering to her sister, “Mama is getting better because she thinks those sugar pills Dr. Thompson gave her are real medicine.”
My maternal grandmother, small in size, would be sick in bed. Then, like magic, she would recover, be up and about—whizzing through her house doing this and that and scatting her cats out of her kitchen, giving no hint that earlier in the day it had appeared that she might be leaving the physical plane at any moment.
My repeatedly hearing Mama and my aunt’s talking about how Granny was getting better because Granny thought that her doctor had given her real medicine, then seeing for myself that Granny suddenly would get well, caused me to imagine that a feat of magic was taking place—magic somehow worked by Granny: She thought something and what she thought happened.
Further, I personally saw my little granny suddenly getting sick, then suddenly getting well after having taken no medicine of any kind—getting well sometimes just after a family member had canceled travel plans of which Granny had disapproved, Mama would say.
As my childhood years were passing, because of what I kept seeing with Granny’s quick onset illnesses, followed by her rapid recoveries, I perceived that Granny had an ability to get sick and to get well at will—although I then had no understanding of the meaning of the word will.
I would wonder: How does Granny do that?
It seemed that Granny was waving some kind of magic wand to get herself what she wanted. I concluded that Granny had to have some kind of thought magic inside her that she somehow put to work in accord with her desires:
“Abracadabra! Get sick! Abracadabra! Get well!”
I learned years later from various sources that what I had decided in the 1940s was get well thought magic by Granny is called a placebo effect, what some call a triumph of expectation over reality.