A boy of fifteen years of age had suffered from a very severe, hard cough for about eighteen months, which would not yield to any form of medical treatment. The family doctor, and the specialists consulted, were frankly puzzled by the condition and by the lack of response to the therapies prescribed.

The lad's father now decided to bring his son to an osteopath, but examination did not reveal anything osteopathically diagnostic. I was thus moved to seek the cause in the boy's psyche, as I felt convinced that this chronic cough was psychogenic in origin.

Before me was a bright, intelligent youngster with an excellent family background. The first question I put to him was did he like school. "Oh yes" he replied "I like school very much indeed, but for ... " "But for what?" I interrupted and he replied: "Latin and mathematics. I loathe and detest these two subjects." I then asked: "Have you noticed whether there were occasions when you coughed more than on others?" Pausing a few minutes before replying, as if in deep thought, he exclaimed with growing aston­ishment "Now I come to think of it my cough is worse on Tuesdays and Fridays." "Why on these particular days?" I queried. "I have no idea." he said.

After a brief pause I followed up my previous question with this query: "On what days do you have instruction in Latin?" "On Tuesdays" he responded. The boy was now intensely alert. I continued: "and of course on Fridays you have tuition in mathe­matics." "Yes" he said. By this time he was fully alive as to what I was getting at, for he asked with great feeling: "Do you think that I have been deliberately 'putting on' this cough? Do you think I could produce a cough like this at will." "Of course not," I count­ered. Neither could he, of that I was certain.

Now I asked the lad to go back in his mind to eighteen months ago, before the severe cough had become established. He related that he had caught a heavy cold and was confined to bed with a high temperature; and then said: "Come to think of it, it was at the time of the examinations in the dreaded subjects of Latin and mathematics. I recovered from the cold but not from the cough, which has persisted right up to the present, more especially on the mornings of Tuesdays and Fridays." I then asked him, what occurred on these mornings when he coughed so badly. "Oh," he replied, "my mother would say that I could not go to school that day, and on a recent occasion my cough was so severe that both my parents said that there was nothing for it but that I should remain at home." Soon after he had told me this he had to admit that the relief he felt was so great that for the rest of the day he did not cough once.

Just two treatments on these lines sufficed to clear up the cough completely, which did not return—much to the amazement of him­self and of his parents.

Now that the boy was fully conscious of the purpose his cough was serving it was not in his nature to play the malingerer and use his cough as an excuse to stay at home in order to escape attending his Latin and mathematics classes respectively. His unconscious motive was revealed to him and this, in his case, effected the cure and enabled him to take his Latin and mathematics in his stride, which in turn raised his morale very considerably. Thus was a truly beneficent cycle established.

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