Aries (incidentally my sun sign!); was the Greek God of war! A formidable God and powerful one at that! So imagine how his son would have been! Now when I say imagine, I do not mean take up your phone and do a Google image search since this is not about him but his son!
Well his son was a frightening and formidable guy! In fact he was so scary or fear inducing that warriors would paint his picture on their shields to give their enemies a real fright and to get them to run away in terror!
Sounds familiar! Not yet?
Well, his name was Phobos!
Yes! The above reaction resembles someone terrified of something! Or as we commonly call it; PHOBIA!
Then a Roman doctor called Celsus used the word hydrophobia (literally, water fear) to describe someone who seemed to have a horror of water!
When in any disease or at least most disease your doctor would advise you to take plenty of water (my cardiologist friends would jump now and say, we actually advice water restriction in heart failure! But that is exception not example!); in this particular disease even the thought of water would give such fright to the affected person!
This is commonly seen in a particular disease and may not be that common now but any medical student who sees this one case would never forget it in his or her life!
The pathognomic feature of this is that water or even cold air would induce severe painful spasm so much so that the patient would be terrified of it!
The trademark of the dreaded Rabies!
Now, you will also think about Celsus and wonder if the unit of temperature in named after him! Well no! This temperature scale was invented and named after Swedish scientist Anders Celsius! ‘I’ is very important sometimes!
Coming back to Phobia! It was of course left to dear Sigmund to give it some psychoanalysis.
In 1895 he noticed that while some things gross out most people at least a little (such as snakes, death, or getting sick), other things only bother a few people!
Years later, Freud wrote about a little boy named Hans who, after being terrified by a horse in the street, developed a strong fear of horses!
Other researchers of the time also began to speculate that phobias were distinct mental condition and of course they all had the phobia of not been taken seriously!
The first relatively modern use of the word phobia wasn’t until 1786, when (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) an unknown writer in the Columbian Magazine defined the word as meaning “A fear of an imaginary evil, or an undue fear of a real one.”
But it wasn’t until 1947 that phobias became a separate diagnostic category in the International Classification of Diseases and finally in the 1960s, it was observed that phobias basically divide themselves into three rather different kinds or categories: agoraphobia, social phobia, and specific phobias.
Of course if you take a list of the most common phobias there will be so many lists that you will develop a phobia of lists!
One such list states how Glossophobia is the number one phobia in America and is the fear of public speaking, with 25% saying they’d prefer to avoid speaking in front of people!
Then you have Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is one of the longest words in the dictionary — and, in an ironic twist, is the name for a fear of long words!
Also in case you are not yet phobic, Sesquipedalophobia is another term for the phobia!
All right then, settle down; if you have phobia see a doctor but I am sure it will be the nursing assistant who will comfort you more!
Talking of Nurse reminds me of Lalitha Pawar! Then again am sure after her eye injury she would have had a phobia of injury which in case you want to know is called traumatophobia!
Now turn off the light if you do not have fear of the dark and sleep!
Subh ratri…
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