Fear of Being Cursed to Death

Nothing physical had been done to him and nothing physical was undone. What changed was what he believed, and the illness followed the belief in both directions.

Alongside it Cannon set the case of a Māori woman who learned that fruit she had eaten came from a place under tapu. She was dead in under twenty-four hours.

What Cannon argued about bone pointing

Cannon, a forerunner of modern physiological psychology, published his account in 1942, proposing that fear of supernatural consequences for a broken taboo could cause physical deterioration and death. What he described has since been called bone-pointing syndrome: a shock interpreted as an ill omen, rapid physical decline, and death within as little as twenty-four hours.

His mechanism was sympathetic. Continuous adrenaline constricts the small arterioles, reducing the volume of circulating blood, which lowers blood pressure, which damages the heart and the nerves maintaining the vessels, which makes circulation harder still. Accelerated heart rate and rapid breathing follow. He added a mundane and important factor: the person stops eating and drinking, and true medical shock from lack of food and water could be the cause of death.

He noted the common features across cases himself:

• both individuals belonged to societies where supernatural belief was strongly held
• both believed themselves cursed within their own framework
• both showed similar physical symptoms

Why Richter's rats inverted the mechanism

Curt Richter answered Cannon's challenge with an animal model in 1957, and the result contradicted him.

Richter placed pre-stressed rats in closed turbulent water and recorded how long they lasted. Most domestic laboratory rats survived for hours. All of the wild rats died within fifteen minutes.

He monitored heart rate and examined whether the heart was in systole or diastole after death. The heart rate slowed before death and the heart was engaged with blood, in diastole. Sympathetic over-arousal would have raised both heart rate and blood pressure sharply, and this was the opposite.

Richter's interpretation was over-stimulation of the parasympathetic nervous system, specifically the vagus nerve, and he named the psychological state producing it: hopelessness.

Hofer showed in 1970 that several rodent species respond to threat with immobility accompanied by a very low heart rate, below half of baseline in some, and distinguished prolonged immobility from death-faking, which arrives as a sudden motor collapse during active struggle. He read the fear-induced slowing as vagal.

The consequence is that this immobilisation response is dangerous for mammals in a way it is not for reptiles. An oxygen-hungry mammal in bradycardia deprives its own organs of blood.

What has been added since

The vision-to-fear and auditory-to-fear pathways describe how a sensory stimulus reaches the amygdala. Esther M. Sternberg set out the sequence in 2002: chemicals and electrical impulses transmitted by nerve fibres, with hormones simultaneously released from the brain, adrenal and pituitary glands, and cardiac arrhythmias frequently resulting from an excess of them.

Wylie Vale discovered corticotropin-releasing hormone in 1981, the hypothalamic stress hormone that coordinates with the brainstem adrenaline centres to produce a massive release of adrenaline-like nerve chemicals and stress hormones together, which could cause loss of appetite, weakness, cardiac arrhythmias and vascular collapse.

Martin A. Samuels describes a further route: catecholamines building up, calcium channels opening and staying open, and an overflow of calcium killing cells.

Why the objections are serious

David Lester argued in 1972 that Cannon's evidence, particularly the animal evidence, is anecdotal and irrelevant, and proposed death by suggestion instead, supporting George L. Engel's giving up and given up complex, which places the cause entirely in the psychological state.

Harry D. Eastwell went further in 1982, rejecting the concept outright and arguing that the deaths Cannon reported were more likely caused by dehydration.

Barbara W. Lex answered the practical objection in 1974, pointing out that voodoo death can be observed without complicated experiments: pupillary constriction indicating parasympathetic activation, and the amount of saliva and perspiration, muscle tone and skin pallor, are all discernible without instruments.

The phenomenon is not confined to any culture. The material names concentration camps and prisoner of war camps alongside the societies Cannon studied, which removes the exoticism the name carries and leaves the mechanism, the same one Fright Sickness and Fear of the Evil Eye describe under their own names.