After June Clark, 17, had sneezed every few seconds of her waking day for five months, experts in half a dozen medical specialties were stymied. Nothing helped, not even a trip to the dry air of Phoenix. The doctors could only conclude that her trouble was psychogenic. Psychologist Malcolm Kushner of Coral Gables VA Hospital volunteered to make an electrical attack on June's sneezing.
The technique is based on Ivan Pavlov's famed conditional-reflex experiment, in which a dog was trained to salivate at the sound of a bell. But for June, the conditioning was the dog-bell routine in reverse. Called...